The austere, frost-bitten city of Oslo undergoes a deep thaw, like the turning of winter to spring, in The Worst Person in the World, the latest film from writer-director Joachim Trier. Oslo, the capital of Norway, is a stately city. Broad, clean, and latticed by walkable, well-paved streets and nature paths. It’s infamously green—both literally, in terms the amount of parks and green spaces within city limits, and the city’s its effort to minimize its carbon foot print. It’s also cultural, studded all over with publicly funded museums, symphony halls, and libraries. And its people, rich in natural resources and well taken care of by their left-leaning parliamentary democracy, are happy. Like happiest country in the world happy.
Oslo, you can see, is a good city, full of good people, doing good things. But like many of its sister cities across the Scandinavian states of Northern Europe, it’s hardly a warm or welcoming place. Trier’s biggest weakness as a writer and as a director over his two decade career making films has been his inherent frigidity. The previous film in the unofficial “Oslo Trilogy,” which The Worst Person in the World caps off, called Oslo, August 31st, is an unceasing spectacle of human misery whose attempts at dynamic tone-shifting and redemptive grace are so buried in a sea of abjection that they come off as maudlin. And if you want to talk maudlin, try and recover the repressed memory, if you’ve seen Trier’s first American effort, Louder Than Bombs, of the greatest actress in the world, Isabelle Huppert, flying through the air after being ejected from her wrecked car with all the emotionality of a house cat kicking litter around after a piss.
An icy, emotionally agnostic approach to your material isn’t a bad thing—look at Michael Haneke, or Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the mastermind behind the ambitious Dau. project. But the subjects that Trier traffics in are exclusively emotional subjects. They are in fact sopping with sentiment and sensation—addiction, infidelity, illness, accidental death, parental death and parental betrayal. The gulf between what Trier wants to achieve and what he ends up with has always held me back from enjoying his films, and even from being appreciative of the craft that went into making them. When they get praised, they get praised for that craft—longtime collaborator Jakob Ihre’s slick digital photography, or Trier’s inventive use of developing shots. If the story or characters are mentioned at all, it’s a note on how clever the conceptual pretzel is that Trier has wrenched them into. But Trier remains undaunted in his pursuit of emotional cinema. In The Worst Person in the World, he has taken up his soppiest subject yet: love. And miraculously, gratefully, he pulls it off. With this recent film, Trier has finally achieved what it seems he’s always wanted. More than a profound human epic—a humane one.
The Worst Person in the World follows its protagonist Julie (Renate Reinsve) through the trials and travails of the young adult “figuring yourself out” stage. Once upon a time, the traditional, sociological markers of adulthood (getting married, buying a home, having kids, getting a career-track job) came all at once, in a kind of cluster in your early 20s. Julie is pushing 30, and is far from attaining any of them. Those which she isn’t downright contemptuous of (getting married, having kids), she simply can’t get (a good job). Modern life, even in a progressive, integrated metropolitan core like Oslo, has become so decentralized, demanding, and byzantine in its bureaucratic unhelpfulness that it stuns even capable and confident young citizens like Julie into a kind of rudderless stupor, from which no attempts at maturation can be meaningfully made.
The Worst Person in the World is told in “12 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue,” an early title card announces. That prologue neatly chronicles the various professionally-oriented personalities Julie has tried on and discarded—doctor (too hard), psychotherapist (not creative enough), photographer (just fizzles out). Throughout the rest of the film, Julie searches for her own voice, whether that comes through picking a professional track and sticking to it, or settling down with a partner and kids, like her older boyfriend’s (Anders Danielsen Lie) friends have all done. Julie spiritedly ricochets around Oslo, settling down with the alt-artist turned yuppie Aksel, blowing that up for a hotter, younger lover in in Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), and then finally returning briefly to Aksel’s side when a third act melodramatic twist strikes Aksel down with a sudden illness.
That we end a film of such spiritual import and dramatic verve with the heroine finally finding a normal job and renting a normal apartment speaks to the quiet unresolve at the center of the whole affair. The Worst Person in the World is frequently charming, bold, and arresting. It’s full of zany digressions (hallucinogenic mushroom trip sequence, instant-classic sequence where Julie runs through a time-stopped Oslo with a transcendent smile) and odd narrative conceits (the chapter structure, occasional narration that dissipates toward the middle and adds very little). Yet even moments after you leave the film, that all fades away. What you remember is the gentle pace, the patient camera work, the earnest performances, and the eminently relatable love triangle at the center of the story.
What I mean to say is the film, though it represents a monumental leap forward for Trier, and offers a truly sublime, romantic experience for viewers, still suffers from Trier’s fundamental confusion over what kind of films he’d like to make. Tonal/story contradictions and directionless formal experiments aside, The Worst Person in the World’s biggest fuck-up is Julie, who Reinsve plays with astonishing aplomb, but who remains distant from the viewer, nearly unknowable. She evinces no passions, no interests, no real problems or pathologies either. She isn’t a self-possessed, disaffected social defector like an Andrea Arnold heroine, or a Bartleby-esque void like Barbara Loden’s Wanda. She resists and resists the social dictates to get up and get on with it, but why? From where? What motivates Julie to do anything she does? Early on, Trier and writing partner Eskil Vogt lazily offer up social media as a possible reason why Julie is so stuck, but you can tell they don’t mean it. The closest we come to knowing the character is a line spoken to Aksel mid-breakup: “I feel like a spectator in my own life.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but not one borne out by the utter main character syndrome that this main character exhibits for the other two hours and seven minutes of the film.
Trier did a tremendous job melting away the permafrost around his depiction of Oslo, Aksel, Eivind, who all sparkle with vitality and texture. Reinsve sparkles too, but Julie hews too closely to her frozen core, doing things movie characters do without really knowing why she does them. Trier suggests that Julie has finally found her voice at the end of The Worst Person in the World. And with this moving, melodic ode to the violet hour of young adulthood, despite its issues, Trier has found his too. It’s still unclear what either of them want to say.