I was trying to figure out what I wanted to see this weekend when a thought hit me: why not see two instead of my usual one and then I can stay home Sunday and get other things done? I knew I wanted to see Cyrano, and while the Studio 666 was tempting as a curio, I instead decided to give a look at The Worst Person in the World. About all I knew about it was it was a foreign language movie about a young woman trying to figure out her life.
I learned after seeing it that it was the third part in director Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy” and is up for a couple Academy Awards, one for original screenplay. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem as if I need to see the other two parts of the Oslo Trilogy to enjoy this one.
As explained in the beginning of the movie, this is the story of Julie (Renate Reinsve) as told over twelve chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue more or less establishes who she is. A top student, she went to medical school since her grades suggested she was good at it before realizing her interests were more in the way the mind works than the body, so she switched to psychology. But then she realized she really wanted to take photographs because she had an eye for it and switched to photography. She meets an older, indie comic book artist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), falls in love and moves in with him. But he is older and wants kids eventually, something she isn’t sure whether she wants or not until she settles down somewhat with what she wants out of life. Along the way, she also meets and falls for a man about her age, Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), but is he the man for her? Does she even want a man? What, in the end, does Julie want out of life?
That, if anything, is the question behind this movie. The title is an odd one in that it doesn’t seem to refer to Julie. She does things to hurt Aksel and Eivind at times, but she never seems to do anything out of malice, and the one time anyone suggests he might be the “worst person,” it’s actually Eivind. The various chapters vary in length and tone, with most of them giving some sense of what kind of person Julie is, and the basic answer is she is largely uncertain if not outright confused at times. In one of the later chapters, she does state something about herself, something that could come across as a thesis statement for the film, and it does seem to show some follow-through for the rest of the movie. Julie at the end of the movie is a more confident person who seems sure of herself than she was at the beginning.
It helps that Reinsve is such a charming actress, one who can handle the different moods that Julie exhibits at different points in the movie. That is most evident in Julie’s relationship with Aksel. It’s a complicated one, one where Julie can say she does and doesn’t love Aksel in the same breath, but at the same time it makes sense. If anything, the movie is the story of how Julie finished growing up. Yes, she is an adult, but like a lot of twentysomethings, she doesn’t necessarily know what she wants out of life, and she’s doing what she can to figure it out.
It is worth noting that despite the comedic elements, I wouldn’t say this was the sort of movie I would laugh out loud for, but maybe I would have had the movie been in English. But as a dramatic character study with romantic elements, even with an ending that might have been something of a head-scratcher, this was some high quality filmmaking that goes beyond language barriers. I don’t think this will be winning Best Original Screenplay, but maybe I should find the other two parts of that Oslo Trilogy. If they were as good as this film, I will be better off for it.
Grade: A
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