*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Lucia Ruan’s review here, and Steven Gong’s review here.*
Make no mistake: Julie (Renate Reinsve) is not the worst person in the world. Not even close. If that title belongs to anyone involved in Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s latest film, it’s the bozo who oversaw its distribution and marketing, who decided that the only way to sell it to American audiences was to release it on Valentine’s weekend and sell it as a feel-good romance movie (both the trailers and poster highlight an Awards Watch pull quote that deems the film “One of the best romantic films of recent times”). But to categorize The Worst Person in the World as a romantic film is to consider atheism a religion, or baldness a hair color: it’s an exercise in defining something by a quality it lacks, and often even pointedly rejects.
No, Trier’s film is more aligned with Miranda July’s The Future, or Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, or even Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None. It’s a film concerned with the anxieties of being young in the 21st century, and how sustained romances just can’t gel with contemporary lifestyles. It chronicles four years in Julie’s life in twelve distinct chapters, plus a brief prologue and a briefer epilogue. The protagonist celebrates her 30th birthday early in the film, so she’s probably a child of the ‘90s, and a quintessential one at that—she’s in an involuntary state of aimless arrested development, bouncing between jobs, hobbies, and lovers as she struggles to find a fulfilling personal corner of a world shaped in the image of older generations. Baby boomers and the most fortunate Gen-Xers have controlled the narratives and norms of nearly every facet of modern life, so even if us ‘90s kids want to defy them, we’re still at the mercy of internalized expectations about what true success looks like: a steady job, a long-term relationship, a nice house, a couple of giggling kids. Through Julie and his other core characters Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), Trier asks the eternal question: do we really want these things, or do we just want to want these things so we can comfortably acquiesce to the vision of our elders without forging our own paths?
I confess that the first half of the film looks like it’s going to be a straightforward romantic dramedy. Julie finds herself at the center of a perplexing love triangle between Aksel and Eivind. She’s in a steady but somewhat passionless relationship with the former, a cartoonist in his mid-40s, who embodies the pull toward a more “traditional” lifestyle. He has a lifelong career, a shiny Oslo apartment, a lot of firmly-held intellectual opinions, and a seemingly close relationship with his family, who the couple tensely visits in an opening chapter that highlights Julie’s discomfort in older spaces. Everything is going fine with Aksel until Julie stumbles into a house party meet-cute with Eivind, a barista much closer to her age. They flirtatiously dance around the parameters of cheating without directly crossing any conventional lines, immediately demonstrating both a crackling romantic chemistry and a refreshing ability to play outside the boundaries of traditionalism.
But once the players are fully introduced, Trier proves to be primarily interested in interrogating Julie as an individual character, using the two men in her life as foils and counterpoints for the majority of the runtime rather than co-leads. The filmmaker’s most effective directorial choice is trusting Reinsve’s performance to carry the film from chapter to chapter. His visual style is mostly quite restrained, opting to hold on the actress even when she’s not talking—her eyes wander and her mouth forms a forced smile when she’s in an uncomfortable or unexplored space. Reinsve is also powerful in showier argument scenes—her vigorous vulnerability ensures that we’re rooting for her even when we know she’s wrong—but she’s strongest in the quiet moments when we can watch her come to complex realizations without uttering a word. The only thing that threatens to undermine her performance is the cloying narration track, which enhances comedic scenes but over-explains dramatic ones.
Despite Trier’s relative restraint, however, there are still bursts of maximalist stylistic indulgence at moments when Julie’s feelings overwhelm the boundaries of straightforward realism. At the climax of the house party meet-cute, when the horny factor is dialed to 11, the director employs sultry slow-mo to relish an unbelievably charged anti-kiss where Julie blows cigarette smoke into Eivind’s open lips. It sounds gross on paper, but it’s hot, trust me. Later, a surreal shrooms trip set piece visualizes Julie’s deepest fears—losing her boyfriend, growing old, and confronting her distant father—with bizarre symbolic imagery in a black void. And, most memorably, a sequence near the midpoint sees the protagonist’s love become so overpowering that it stops time, allowing the camera to glide through a frozen Oslo as Julie runs through the streets with limp-wristed joy.
But after all the lovers connect and the fun has been had, the film transitions into existential tragedy. All three of the central characters become lonelier than ever due to a combination of medical misfortune and poor decisions. It’s here that Trier’s contemplative writing shines the brightest, as the somber circumstances of the back half permit him to grapple with mortality, maternity, aging, and fate, ultimately fixating on the disappointing disparity between expectations and reality. And it barrels toward a soberly antiromantic conclusion that echoes Annie Hall with even more cynicism: even if it were possible for these people to make each other happy forever, it still wouldn’t be right. The film is so thoroughly in Julie’s corner that it successfully makes us believe everything she believes, even if it’s directly at odds with what we thought five minutes ago. When she loves someone, they seem perfect for her, but as soon as she vocalizes dissatisfaction or concern, we want the guys to step up their game or pack their bags. The film ultimately comes to a nuanced but saddening conclusion: romances can be effective stepping stones for personal growth, but rarely (if ever) a worthwhile endeavor if things start to get too difficult. It envisions love as fleeting—deeply felt, but a temporary means to an end, utilities destined for eventual failure. The film makes convincing, thoughtful arguments to support positions about love with which many viewers (including me) will fundamentally disagree, which makes The Worst Person in the World a phenomenal piece of cinematic art and an intentionally terrible piece of romantic storytelling.