Not quite knowing your own story is one of the most relatable stories in the world. And yet it’s one we don’t see on film that often, probably because it doesn’t make for the easiest pitch. “Okay, so there’s this girl, and she doesn’t quite know what she wants to do with her life, and she has a series of relationships while she figures it out.”
“Hmm, and you want money to make this?”
This pitch describes the basic framework of The Worst Person In The World, from director Joachim Trier and writer Eskil Vogt, but, like Boyhood or any novelistic take on one person’s life, the elevator pitch doesn’t begin to do it justice. Trier and Vogt’s take on one overachieving but aimless Oslo girl (Osloan? Oslian? Osloite?) is by turns earnest, sardonic, heartbreaking, and as a whole, weirdly thrilling.
In a year of two and a half-hour movies about superheroes and car chases that felt roughly seven hours long (looking at you, James Bond) The Worst Person In The World is 127-minutes of flirting, fighting, and intense conversations that had me hooked, basically from opening credits to closing. I still don’t know how that gets pitched or greenlit, but God bless the Norwegians for figuring it out.
Presented as “a story in 12 parts, with prologue and epilogue,” Renate Reinsve plays Julie, an Oslo overachiever on the cusp of adulthood who doesn’t seem to have a solid plan for her life. She studies first medicine then psychology then photography and then journalism, all while having a series of relationships — most notably with an older, bad boy cartoonist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). The morning after their first hook up, Aksel delivers an articulate, almost practiced-sounding shpiel about how this relationship could never work, because they’re both at such different stages in life and it’s probably better to just go their separate ways now and avoid the inevitable heartbreak. It’s at this point, Julie’s voiceover informs us, that she decides that she’s madly in love with this otherwise unremarkable man.
The “too real” relationship between them that ensues quickly becomes an emotional roller coaster. His career, as the Robert Crumb/Ralph Steadman-esque creator of a popular punk cartoon about a vulgar, horny bobcat, seems to thrive. There’s a transcendent moment during which Aksel, played by Lie with impeccable deadpan poise, explains earnestly why Bobcat needs to have his original drawn-on butthole, and why having it excised (Cats-style) for a treacly Christmas movie would be a crime against art.
While Aksel blossoms, Julie merely treads water, working at an indie bookstore while waiting for some bolt of divine inspiration about what she should do with her life. The two of them have, in many ways, the precise difficulties Aksel predicted to begin with, and also the same conflicts as in virtually every monogamous heterosexual relationship. She resents his independence, he resents her indecision, and there’s the constant tension that results from a partner with an established career at the stage of life when he could be starting a family trying to share a life with someone who’s still experimenting, figuring out who she wants to be, and sowing wild oats. The conflict seems to come to a head during a weekend away, sharing a house with Aksel’s children-having friends.
That all sounds like pretty standard fare on paper, but in practice The Worst Person In The World always has a remarkable specificity. Trier and Vogt’s wit, combined with Reinsve and Lie’s deft performances transcend everyday situations. Just as Richard Linklater can build brilliant scenes from dumbass characters (I like to think of him as “The Dumbass Whisperer”), Joachim Trier builds an oddly thrilling world out of slightly dull intellectuals, producing in me a reaction that shifted uncomfortably between derision and self-recognition from scene to scene.
The Worst Person In The World turns into a bit of a tearjerker in the final few chapters, thanks to a plot development that might’ve seemed manipulative or unearned in a different movie. Instead, I was fully invested by then, hanging on every word and feeling like I too had had the rug pulled out from under me. I find myself at a bit of a loss when trying to explain exactly what about it had me so engaged, probably for the same reasons Julie can’t seem to decide on a career. The Worst Person In The World feels like life. And how do you sum up a life?
The biggest outstanding question seems to be why it’s called “The Worst Person In The World.” Julie is clearly the main character, and she doesn’t seem like a great candidate for world’s worst. She’s occasionally a little naive or careless, maybe, but always far more relatable than despicable. Is it because Julie thinks of herself as the worst person in the world? This seems more plausible, but the justification for it still seems thin.
In any case, The Worst Person In The World is captivating, inspired storytelling, and you should definitely watch it. If you figure out which character in it is the worst person in the world, tell me, and next time I watch when they come on the screen I’ll make sure to nudge my date and whisper “Psst, that’s the worst person in the world.”
‘The Worst Person In The World’ is available in theaters February 4th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.