The Worst Person in the World: Lost and Found

The Worst Person in the World is the final installment in what Trier has called the Oslo Trilogy. Reprise (2006), the first film in the trilogy (and Trier’s first feature), details the close friendship between two young novelists (Espen Klouman Høiner and Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie). The film has a mischievous and self-aware energy, ricocheting from mood to mood, calling to mind the work of the French New Wave directors but exhibiting Trier’s own sensibility right out of the gate, including the intriguing way he uses voice-over narration. Oslo, August 31st (2011), the second film, nods to Louis Malle’s 1963 The Fire Within (both are adapted from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le feu follet) and portrays a bleak day in the life of a recovering heroin addict (Lie again), wandering through Oslo, facing the damage he and his addiction have done. In both Reprise and Oslo, August 31st, a main character says, “I have to get out of Oslo.” The Worst Person in the World breaks rank—no one declares a desire to leave—but its characters’ relationship with Oslo is still paramount. In Worst Person, Oslo is not stifling, but it is mysterious and somewhat withholding, almost an illusion, a facade behind which “real life” lurks. There are sequences in all three films in which the city is nearly emptied of people, as in the eerie final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse. Oslo beckons and recedes at the same time. Worst Person has more in common with Reprise than Oslo, August 31st in terms of overall mood, but all three are interested in what it feels like to be lost in your own life, to feel like you’re behind your peers and you’ll never, ever catch up.

The prologue of Worst Person is a whimsical and fast-paced montage, telling us what we need to know about Julie’s life: she begins the film in medical school, then switches to studying psychology, and then decides to become a photographer. The narrator fills in the subtext: “She sensed a growing unease she had tried to suppress,” “Julie disappointed herself,” etc. Julie makes these huge choices almost impulsively. She doesn’t change her life so much as she sheds lives like a snake’s skins. Then she meets Aksel (Lie), an older man, successful in his chosen career (he is the writer and illustrator of a raunchy popular comic book). The spark between Aksel and Julie is real, and she moves in with him almost immediately. They’re a good fit, but maybe they met at the wrong time. Aksel is at a different life stage; he would like to have kids. Julie isn’t ready. Aksel understands being afraid to have kids but observes, “You seem to be waiting for something. I don’t know what.”

“Trier likes those in-between spaces where ambiguity and ambivalence exist not as momentary cerebral flashes but as a way of being in the world.”

Julie doesn’t know either. One night, feeling bored and out of place at a swanky party, she leaves and crashes another party, where she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). They both admit they’re seeing other people, but they launch into an extended flirtation that lasts the course of the party. This magical sequence is key to all that follows. The connection is instantaneous, but there’s a gossamer-thin quality to it: their dynamic is a shimmering, fragile web of laughter and play. Still, play can be very serious—more serious than an actual serious conversation. Julie is alert to the comedic potential in life. Finding things funny or entertaining—including herself—is the same thing as finding them interesting or intriguing. Being curious about life and other people is part of her identity. Even in darker moments, her humor is always in operation. Eivind and Julie each recognize in the other not a soul mate but an intoxicating playmate. Refreshed, they go back to their partners. But not for long.

People talk a lot about how adolescence now extends well into the twenties and even thirties. Julie’s state is not unusual. There’s a moment when she looks at her mother and grandmother, and scans photographs on a nearby shelf of her great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother. She thinks about what they were doing at the age of thirty. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s extended essay on women’s economic and creative liberation (and the connection between the two), published in 1929, is referenced throughout Worst Person, mostly by osmosis (although it gets a nod in the credits). In the essay—in which Woolf shifts between first and third person to create a highly fluid “I”—“Mary Seton,” one of the author’s projections, looks at pictures of her own female ancestors on a mantelpiece and considers what their lives had been: “Mary’s mother—if that was her picture—may have been a wastrel in her spare time (she had thirteen children by a minister of the church), but if so her gay and dissipated life had left too few traces of its pleasures on her face.” Woolf wanted a different kind of life. Julie does too.

Putting Worst Person into a box labeled “romantic comedy” is as misguided as putting George Cukor’s Holiday there, although you’ll hear both described that way. The two films would make a fine double bill. Holiday also features a woman, Linda Seton (Katharine Hepburn), who feels lost and at the same time is passionately interested in the people around her. There’s urgency in Hepburn’s every gesture in Holiday, an awareness of the clock ticking her life away. Cary Grant’s Johnny shares that urgency. Their attic playroom is a utopia, just like the one Julie and Eivind stumble into when they meet. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Love isn’t frivolous. What’s more important, though, is recognizing and understanding your own life, and your place in the world.

Renate Reinsve was about to give up acting altogether when Trier sent her the script. She has only two lines in Oslo, August 31st, but she had made an impression on Trier. In the intervening years, she did theater and worked in television but was dissatisfied with the roles she was getting. Trier, too, wondered why she wasn’t getting the parts she deserved. He and Vogt wrote Worst Person specifically for her. You can see why. Throughout, she has moments that elude categorization, that resist being pinned down. Usually this occurs when Trier focuses the camera on her face and gives us the space and time to just watch her think and feel. The moment is never just one thing. It’s always in the process of transformation. Julie is often maddening, and her impulsivity is both exciting and hurtful. Reinsve is not afraid of ugliness (in one scene Julie says something cruel to Eivind, and he looks as though he has been stabbed), and she does not shy away from the messier complexities of Julie’s life. During the scene in which she breaks up with Aksel, he says to her, “You’ll regret this.” She says, “I’m sure I will.” It’s impossible to describe just how much Reinsve expresses in those four small words.