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'The Worst Person in the World' Review: Oslo, Her Way

Renate Reinsve stars in Joachim Trier's funny-sad story of a woman on the verge of figuring herself out.

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'The Worst Person in the World' | Beefcake of a Scene

The manager Joachim Trier narrates a sequence from his motion picture featuring Renate Reinsve.

My name is Joachim Trier, and I am the co-writer and director of The Worst Person in the World. In this scene, we encounter the lead graphic symbol in the flick, Julie, played by Renate Reinsve, and she'south with her slightly older fellow Aksel. And she is very curious to explore romantically this other relationship with a guy called Eivind. And so what we're experimenting with in the scene is, what would happen if she could freeze fourth dimension and run away from her present human relationship and effort to take a moment for herself with the other guy? I did not want the sequence to be this slick CGI, perfect thing. I wanted it to take a human experience. I wanted it to feel more than similar an old-school musical or something. Then what we did was we asked people effectually Oslo to stand withal while we would have Julie run past them and run along the streets and various spots that we've called. So most of the people you see are extras that were hired. And they were cast on the notion that, tin can you stand equally if you're running, almost? Or can you stand still like this or that? So they all had an idea coming on set. And we did prep days, and I had a wonderful squad of people assistance me arrange the choreography of it, rather, this frozen choreography of the sequence. Only a lovely affair that happened towards the end of this sequence that she runs down a street and nosotros just follow her, and nosotros realized of a sudden that people take joined in. People have been looking out their windows and realized what we were doing out of their apartments or something. And so a couple of people had meet the street and just froze in new positions, merely to add on on the 2nd or third take. So it became this almost feeling of a party. And mind you, we did this afterwards the first wave of COVID. And then I think there was an added joy, both for the flick team and for the people that were a part of it, to gather in such large crowds again. It was really some really lovely days on fix to do this. [MUSIC PLAYING]

The director Joachim Trier narrates a sequence from his film featuring Renate Reinsve. Credit Credit... Neon

The Worst Person in the Globe

NYT Critic'due south Pick

Directed past Joachim Trier

One-act, Drama, Romance

R

2h 7m

Who does Julie recall she is?

It'due south certainly a question that can exist asked in the usual rhetorical, judgmental way. A footloose resident of Oslo skipping and stumbling into her 30s, Julie (Renate Reinsve) can exist brazenly indifferent to the norms of polite behavior and the feelings of others. It's not for nothing that the motion picture, directed past Joachim Trier from a script he wrote with his frequent collaborator Eskil Vogt, is called "The Worst Person in the World," which seems meant to solicit or disarm our disapproval. (When the title phrase is invoked onscreen, by the way, it doesn't refer to Julie at all, but to a person who past all appearances is unquestionably dainty.)

Actually, though, the question of who Julie thinks she is should be asked in earnest: It identifies the problem that she and the filmmakers fix out to solve. This fast-moving, irreverent quasi-comedy takes the thing of her identity seriously, sometimes more than than she does herself.

What does Julie want to be? At the start, that is more a applied than a philosophical question. Before her story is properly underway — before the outset of the 12 numbered and titled chapters that make up the plot has even begun — nosotros learn a few things about her. She abandons medical school to study psychology, and then ditches that to become a photographer. Eventually she takes a task in a bookstore. Her pilus color changes from blondish to pink to brownish. She casts off a sweet-seeming boyfriend, has a fling with a sleazy-looking professor and moves on to a hunky, hairless model. All of this is shown in quick cuts and narrated, in the 3rd person, by an unseen older-sounding woman (Ine Jansen supplies the vocalization) whose dry recitation of the facts seems just the slightest bit judgy, fifty-fifty if you don't empathise Norwegian.

Prototype

Credit... Neon

Virtually of "The Worst Person in the Earth" follows Julie through the delights and frustrations of two significant relationships: with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a graphic novelist in his 40s; and with Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a barista closer to her ain age. To the extent that this is the tale of a young adult female choosing between culling suitors, it suggests romantic comedy, a genre Trier both subverts and satisfies. Julie's sharp, sometimes cruel sense of humour is ane source of laughter. Another is Trier's satirical eye for the foibles of the mod metropolitan heart grade as it grapples with parenthood, fitness, etiquette and climate change.

He is confident plenty to wear his influences on his sleeve without falling into empty pastiche or pious homage. The vox-over, the love triangle and the brisk insouciance of his way might put yous in heed of François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim." The jazz clarinet that provides a bridge from the prologue to the offset chapter (setting upwardly Billie Holiday'due south version of "The Way You lot Await This evening") surely conjures the specter of Woody Allen'due south "Manhattan."

So does Trier's heart-on-the-sleeve amore for Oslo, which folds "The Worst Person in the World" into a loose trilogy with his earlier films "Reprise" and "Oslo, Baronial 31st." (Lie, a fascinating and mercurial screen presence, is crucial to all three movies.) The cliché that the city is a character in its own right seems woefully insufficient. The Norwegian upper-case letter is what gives the film its character and explains its characters. It'southward a make clean, well-lighted urban center with a cleaved middle. For all his cinematic eclecticism and exuberance, Trier belongs to a cultural tradition that includes Ibsen, Strindberg, Munch and Knausgaard — non the most whimsical visitor. A mood of somber rumination falls over the fun like a slant of winter light. Somebody's tears are e'er on the horizon, and bloodshed lurks around every corner.

Julie's improvisational, sometimes reckless approach to work and love — the independence that intoxicates and baffles her — expresses a fourth dimension and a place as well as her specific temperament. On her 30th altogether, she thinks back on women from earlier generations in her family, whose antique images wink across the screen. When they were her age, she reflects, these foremothers had been married and sometimes divorced, given birth to children and one time already died. Julie is aware of her good luck, though she also takes it for granted. She tin pursue life on her own terms. The trick is figuring out what those terms are.

For a while, information technology seems as if this volition involve choosing the correct man. Julie's father (Vidar Sandem) is a neglectful narcissist, and she'south fortunate that both Aksel and Eivind are, all in all, much nicer guys. Some of this is a sign of generational progress — not that 21st-century Kingdom of norway, as Julie experiences it, is exactly a feminist utopia.

Shortly subsequently their first hookups, Aksel tries to end his relationship with Julie because of the difference in their ages, worrying that their incompatible expectations will cause trouble between them. "That was the moment she roughshod in love with him," the narrator notes, earlier Julie goes on to prove him correct.

His Gen 10 friends, struggling with parenthood and the specter of centre age, await corny and compromised in her millennial eyes. He's well established in his career, and fifty-fifty somewhat famous, thanks to an underground comic book that Julie finds "vaguely sexist." (Later, information technology will be denounced by a critic on the radio as irredeemably sexist.) She can't help but experience his patience with her equally condescension, his self-confidence as complacency. (In this, their relationship resembles the one between the Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps characters in Mia Hansen-Love'south "Bergman Isle.")

One dark, Julie wanders abroad from Aksel and crashes a wedding, which is where she meets Eivind. He'southward besides in a human relationship, and they spend the evening testing the boundary between flirting and cheating. Technically, they stay on the correct side of that line, even though their celibate interactions are hotter than some of the movie's actual sexual activity scenes.

Nobody's perfect. When Aksel praises an essay Julie writes, she's incredulous and encouraged. When Eivind compliments her writing, she'due south indignant. Aksel is also intellectual; Eivind isn't intellectual enough. "Are y'all planning to go along serving coffee until you're 50?" she sneers at him. Meanwhile, she's still working in the bookstore.

So she isn't the nicest person in the world. One thing you lot might find is that she doesn't seem to have any female friends. Is this considering of her shortcomings, or evidence of an imaginative blind spot on Trier and Vogt'southward part? Reinsve'south performance is vivid, inventive and grounded — she entirely deserved the interim award she won in Cannes last yr — but to some extent, Julie remains a heart-anile man's idea of a younger adult female. If that sounds similar I'm scolding, I'd add that the same is truthful of Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler and most of Henry James'due south heroines. Also that, every bit a eye-aged man myself, I don't entirely trust my reaction to the character.

Who does the film think she is? That's a different question than the ane I started with, but it's an interesting 1 in its own right, and one Trier is honest enough to leave open. If "The Worst Person in the World" is about Julie's indecision, it'south also about Trier's ambiguity. Some of the suspense in the moving picture comes from wondering what he will practise with her, and whether, equally much as he loves her, he can figure out how to prepare her free.

The Worst Person in the Globe
Rated R. Sexual practice, drugs and Art Garfunkel'due south comprehend of Tom Jobim's "Waters of March." In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running fourth dimension: two hours 7 minutes. In theaters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/movies/the-worst-person-in-the-world-review.html

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