*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Steven Gong’s review here, and Wesley Stenzel’s review here.*
The third installment of Danish-Norwegian writer-director Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy” bears several similarities to the previous two. First, Anders Danielsen Lie plays key characters in all three. Every film grapples with the struggles of professionally pursuing a creative field, and each has accumulated great critical acclaim upon release; Trier’s 2006 film Reprise was called the best Norwegian film of the decade by Norwegian paper Verdens Gang, and his 2011 work Oslo, August 31st won Best Film and Best Cinematography at the Stockholm International Film Festival.
However, unlike Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, Trier’s latest—which Vanity Fair and The Atlantic are hailing as the best movie of 2021—focuses on a woman as its main character. In The Worst Person in the World, this change from the previous “Oslo” installments shifts Anders Danielsen Lie to a supporting role for the first time in Trier’s films, allowing Renate Reinsve to shine as the main character, Julie. Reinsve has already received the award for Best Actress at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival despite deciding to quit acting the day before she received the role. Nevertheless, Trier’s depiction of a woman’s journey through life and love largely results in an end product that is visually stunning but emotionally empty.
The first two films in the “Oslo Trilogy” received praise for carrying the realistic weight of themes like suicide, depression and addiction. This time, Trier co-wrote The Worst Person in the World with screenwriter and director Eskil Vogt to evoke self-love and self-acceptance. The film’s issue is not with exploring these themes by themselves, but that its attempts to do so through a woman’s eyes come across as somewhat frivolous and dismissive next to Trier’s previous works, which give dimension to heavier topics through men. While Julie initially seeks to become a doctor (and then a psychologist, a photographer, and a writer), her professional ambitions and goals are put on the back burner in order to pursue romance instead. Each stage of her life is defined by the men she becomes entangled with, from a psychology professor to a fashion model.
When her hook up with graphic novelist Aksel turns into a relationship over the course of a night, Julie immediately moves in with her new lover. At their break up around the halfway point of the film, Aksel expresses concern about where she’ll go, but she doesn’t have to live in limbo for very long; she quickly begins dating a man she met at a party named Eivind, promptly settling into cohabitation with him. In this way, Julie demonstrates her inability to occupy a physical space in the world entirely her own.
Nevertheless, she’s clearly seen to hold gender empowering ideals. Though she lambasts the double standard that forces women to suffer through menstruation, yet would uplift and protect men if they were to endure the same, she doesn’t seem to care about her older partner Aksel’s patriarchal views. In fact, when Aksel’s sexist graphic novel “Gaupe,” or “Bobcat” in English, gains attention, Aksel gets into an argument with a radio personality about the representation of women within his work. Their disagreement escalates until Aksel ends up making comments that jeopardize his reputation, but Julie seems more concerned about Aksel than the woman he indirectly called a whore. Soon, she finds out he has incurable cancer, so his flaws go uninterrogated by both the screenwriters and the audience for the sake of sympathizing with his plight.
Aksel’s final moments serve as a much-too-obvious device for Julie to reflect upon the meaning of life, particularly as she is faced with a life-changing decision. The two reminisce on their time together, which viewers soon realize they know next to nothing about despite sitting through almost two hours of it. Julie tells Aksel, “I don’t have anyone to talk to the way we used to talk,” but the film provides little evidence of the couple’s meaningful interactions beyond their arguments and sex life.
From the audience’s perspective, the pair’s relationship jumps from an awkward bar flirtation featuring Julie lying about her enjoyment of “Gaupe,” which she mentally recalls as somewhat misogynistic, to Aksel telling Julie to leave after hooking up because “If we go on, I’ll fall in love with you.” The pieces that make up this love are sparse. Even the way their breakup occurs, with a narrator speaking over their dialogue, creates a feeling of distance between the viewer and the couple, with their real thoughts and emotions essentially reduced by a voiceover akin to the Google translator voice.
Perhaps their relationship is something outsiders are never meant to be privy to, or maybe love told through another language and another culture suffers some mistranslations along the way. It’s also possible that the audience just isn’t offered enough substance in Julie as a main character to be convinced of the full spectrum of her love, much less her life. Through her every action and every word, there is minimal insight into Julie’s motivations, from her decision to toe the line of infidelity with Eivind to her choice to impulsively pursue writing. Her deepest secret is related to sex, and her writing is granted an estimated ten minutes of screen time. In fact, Julie’s lack of depth may stem from Trier himself, who doesn’t seem to see it as important to her character. The woman he constructs as his lead is strong and strange and captivating — but not human. Her worries (“I feel like a spectator in my own life”) seem pasted on as an addendum to her as opposed to a part of her very being.
As a result, when Julie finally earns her own space and her own career by the conclusion of the film, it doesn’t feel fulfilling. The film doesn’t see her grow or struggle toward this independence, so there is no reason to celebrate it.
In the end, The Worst Person in the World is not a terrible film. It’s also not great. Instead, it’s just mediocre, with a beautiful Norway backdrop setting apart an otherwise uninventive depiction of a young woman’s boy problems.