The first thing The Worst Person in the World — Oscar contender for Best International Feature — tells us about Julie [Renate Reinsve in an extraordinary, affecting turn], its 20-something protagonist, is that she is eternally confused and eager to stumble upon meaning. The kind of person so confident of her indecisiveness that she can be certain about nothing. So she proceeds to search for answers in everyone else.
The opening montage of the Norwegian film is constructed around her unrest: Julie is a medicine student until she is not. Convinced that her “passion had always been the soul — the mind, not the body,” Julie switches course to study psychology. A boyfriend is dumped, and her hair is coloured to give way to a new identity. But after Julie hooks up with her psychology professor, her heart suddenly remembers that she is actually a “visual person.” Once again, Julie switches gears, doubly convinced that photography is her calling. A temp job at a bookstore acts as a welcome accompaniment in her pursuit of artistic passion. Julie’s romantic couplings similarly ebb and flow: she seems to be an expert at waltzing into other people’s lives until she gets bored of it all.
In filmmaking lexicon, Julia exhibits classic traits of the flaky girl syndrome. She resembles the kind of protagonist whose life revolves around her whims and pauses: one who think they know what they want without exactly knowing what it really is; the kind of person who chooses to start over every time the distance between dreams and reality inconvenience her; the kind of unreliable partner who cannot be contained or content, prone to pushing away lovers in favor of the promise of endless possibilities.
But in Joachim Trier’s hands [the script is co-written by Trier and regular collaborator Eskil Vogt], Julie turns out to be anything like the flaky girl we have come to recognise on screen. That is to say, The Worst Person in the World does not see Julie’s flakiness [which a character in the film admits is a nice distraction from his intense phases of creative concentration] as just a phase. Instead, it indulges her contradictions with the same tenderness and urgency as she does. The rhythmic nonchalance of the film's structure and its gliding camerawork beautifully mirror the ebbs and flows of Julie’s ill-fated impulses.
That only happens because The Worst Person in the World is a romantic comedy that throws its own coming-of-age party. In that, it sees Julie as both a love-interest in someone else’s life and, more crucially, the heroine of her own life. The choices makes then, as she leaves a lover, [literally] pauses time, and runs towards another is her way of choosing herself before choosing anyone else. In any other film, Julie would only be primed as the object of affection, and by extension, accused of being someone who cannot make good things last. Her purpose in a script would exist to serve a man, or worse, a happy-ever-after with a man. The Worst Person in the World, on the other hand, insists that she makes life wait to arrive at the answers she needs in her own time. Trier, a compassionate and wise filmmaker, refuses to hold Julie with contempt, sharply underlining the futility of making anything last if it is not good for her.
After all, is being a villain in someone else’s memory really the worst thing that could happen if you are still the hero of your own life?
Divided into 12 chapters which are bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, The Worst Person in the World boasts of a rhythmic nonchalance that rankles in both its simplicity and ingenuity. Part of the reason why the movie feels so revolutionary despite traversing familiar beats of a romantic comedy is because of the image it crafts of its central protagonist. For Trier, the capricious Julie’s attempts to knock some direction into her life, perennially asking more from life, is a language of rebellion that is often out of reach for womanhood. The pursuit of love takes up so much time and space in the life of any millennial woman that it becomes easy to mistake it with life itself. But really, life happens elsewhere, somewhere in between choosing to go down a path, and then almost as easily choosing to go the other way the next minute.
The Worst Person in the World is that rare rom-com that frames the extent of Julie’s inner thoughts and feelings with as much consequence as a battle sequence in a war film. Decision shapes a person as much as their indecision. It is just that very few movies have paused to consider showing us the other side of the picture, one where the bruises that one accumulates while trying to feel alive in every moment starts resembling like a badge of honour. There is something so rewarding about watching a film starring a woman who never for once regrets giving into her impulses or is, for that matter, shamed and punished for it. After all, what could be so wrong in deciding to choose yourself day after day?
The Worst Person in the World is streaming on MUBI. Oscars 2022 will take place on 28 March.
Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on Twitter.
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