The Worst Person In The World
Directed by Joachim Trier
Running time: 2hrs1 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY
Herbert Nordrum and Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person In The World
Can a film be an affectionate defence and a pitiless dissection all at once? I think it can, if the dissection is performed with sufficient attention to detail and the defence is clear-eyed about its subject’s shortcomings, real or perceived. Whether Julie, the young-ish woman at the heart of Joachim Trier’s excellent The Worst Person In The World, really needs defending (as the wry title perhaps implies) will depend on your perspective, and perhaps whether you identify with her, or with someone like her. There’s certainly a light sense that she’s on trial here.
If you’ve been dumped by a Julie, a woman who has chosen to break up with a string of perfectly nice men simply because she wasn’t feeling it, perhaps you’ll find her indefensible — but all the more reason for you to watch this film, which fleshes out the inner world of a character type far too often cast as a villain. She’s more usually encountered in cinema as the girl the hero is thrown over by before he meets The One. Or the younger girlfriend destined to be the butt of jokes in a dinner party scene featuring a bunch of thirty or forty somethings. Sometimes she is a manic pixie dream shrew to be tamed, and her domestication forms the arc of her storyline.
Here, she’s the heart of the film, and Renate Reinsve quite rightly won Best Actress at Cannes for her charming, many-layered performance. Nevertheless, one of this story’s attractions is that every character is drawn with equal care and sympathy. Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, also compelling in Mia Hansen Love’s Bergman’s Island, also here at Cannes), is a man pretty well aware of what he’s getting into, but who gets into it nevertheless. He is complex and spiky and tender and you can absolutely see why Julie falls for him, bruised and world-wearily sexy as he is — in an angular, low-key kinda way. Herbert Nordrum, too, is appealing as the slightly more straightforward Eivind, striking a bright, true note against the slightly more melancholic chords played by Danielsen Li.
But it’s not ultimately the boys’ show, and Reinsve uncorks a fine vintage champagne of a performance: sparkling, intoxicating and full of depth and complexity.
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (VERDENS VERSTE MENNESKE) (2021) Written by Joachim Trier, Eskil Vogt | Shot by Kasper Tuxen | Edited by Olivier Bugge Coutté
Selected for the Competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival
