Review: The Worst Person In The World

Image courtesy of Neon.

An old saying goes, "Life is what happens to us when we are busy making other plans." In the case of Julie (Renate Reinsve), life is what happens when she's busy overthinking her life. The film is the third in Joachim Trier's unofficial Oslo trilogy - which also includes "Reprise" and "Oslo, August 31st" - and is the best of the bunch, and possibly also the best film by the director to date.

The film's protagonist, Julie, is at one of those moments in which she's waiting for her life to officially begin, as the young tend to do. Having recently turned age 30, she notes, "I feel like a spectator in my own life." When we first meet her, she is in medical school, but quickly decides she'd rather be a psychologist than a doctor who operates on patients. Then, suddenly - and to her mother's surprise, she decides she wants to be a photographer. However, she ends up working in a bookstore.

Her love life isn't any more organized. At the film's beginning, she's involved with a guy whom we barely meet because, suddenly, she finds herself in a relationship with a comic book artist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) who's just shy of 15 years older than she is. Near the beginning of the picture, she goes to spend a weekend at a secluded and scenic getaway spot for Aksel's family. Julie feels that her presence there is awkward, and the abundance of children present lead to some arguments between Julie and Aksel about whether they want any kids of their own. The clock is ticking for Aksel, but Julie is still young enough to ponder.

Just when it seems as if life has settled down, Julie - much to Aksel's surprise - drops a bomb on him: She wants out of the relationship for seemingly no other reason than that settling down seems to bother her. It also doesn't help that, shortly before, she met another guy - the tall, lanky Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) - at a party she crashed, where the two of them spend the evening "not cheating." This entails them whispering secrets to each other and sitting in one another's company as they use the bathroom, but no physical contact.

Eivind also has a significant other - a woman deeply ingrained with every initiative possible to save the world whose yoga practices end up becoming the film's funniest joke - but when he runs into Julie again at the bookstore where she works, it seems like kismet. She breaks it off with Aksel in a particularly painful scene and gets involved with Eivind. Their adventures include a trippy sequence in which she stumbles upon his stash of magical mushrooms and, perhaps, gets a little out of control in front of some guests.

The film's piece de resistance is a magical moment midway through when Julie wanders into the kitchen to find Aksel pouring the coffee - this is shortly before their break up - and turns on a light, somehow making him freeze in mid-action. She wanders outside to find everyone frozen. She runs through the streets and heads to the coffee shop where Eivind, her soon-to-be new lover, awaits. He's the only other person not frozen in action, so the two share a kiss and spend the day together. When she returns home, Aksel unfreezes and they resume where they were.

Trier's film does a great job exploring what it's like to be at that age when one's expectations can lead to restlessness and, in some cases, recklessness. No longer in her 20s, Julie puts all sorts of pressure on herself - shouldn't she know by now what she wants to do with her life? Shouldn't she have a career path marked out? Shouldn't she have by now met the person she wants to spend her life with? Shouldn't she be thinking of having kids? Shouldn't she have some stability?

This feeling that she's wasting her promise makes Julie an interesting character, not just an impulsive one. The relationships in the film are also compelling. On the one hand, her life with Aksel seems, at times, safe and staid, which obviously bugs Julie - but there's a scene late in the film in which she visits him during a particularly challenging moment, long after they've broken up, and it's easy to see why their rapport kept them together for so long. The relationship between Julie and Eivind is looser and there's more room to breathe, but this quickly begins to grate on her nerves.

Despite some very sad moments late in the picture, it ends on a hopeful note for Julie, who learns the value of another old adage: "The race is long, and in the end it is only with yourself." Trier's film is an engrossing, frequently funny and just as often moving film about trying to put one's expectations aside and just getting along with the business of living.