“The Worst Person in the World” is a Norwegian film that made a splashy debut at last summer’s Cannes Film Festival, and no wonder: It’s brilliant. (One on-the-scene reviewer rightly called it “an instant classic.”) At a glance, the picture might seem like a standard coming-of-age tale — the story of a young Oslo woman named Julie (the radiant Renate Reinsve) who finds herself on the cusp of 30 and still wondering when her life is going to get started. The film is about much more than millennial angst, though; over the course of its trim two-hour runtime, it touches down on most of the gnawing concerns of human existence: love, loss, death, sex. (Also, unexpectedly, magic mushrooms.)
The script, by director Joachim Trier and his longtime writing partner, Eskil Vogt, is a work of artful concision — a succession of knockout scenes that glow with youthful exuberance and tiptoe around the edge of heartbreak without ever toppling over into showy bathos. And the cast is perfect: The magnetic Reinsve won the Best Actress award at Cannes, and her costars, Anders Danielsen Lie and Herbert Nordrum, who play two of Julie’s lovers, exhibit a rare facility for conveying, respectively, intellectual warmth and lovelorn devotion. (The movie has also been nominated for Oscars this year in the categories of Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature, but the three deserving leads were regrettably overlooked.)
For all her obvious intelligence, Julie has never been able to commit to any one path in life. Early on we see her growing dissatisfied with pre-med classes, and then with psychology studies (where her fellow students, she says, are mostly “clever girls with eating disorders”). She tries photography next, but finally ends up clerking at a bookstore. Before long she meets Aksel (Lie), a well-known underground-comics creator, and they fall in love to the sound of a toddling Billie Holiday song (a stylistic flourish lifted from the old Woody Allen playbook).
Part of Julie’s attraction to Aksel — who is 15 years her senior — is his glamorous pop-culture lifestyle: book signings, photo shoots, movie deals. There’s also his wealth of worldly knowledge: Counseling her to ignore naysayers and guard against self-doubt, he says, “the only thing worse than all the idiots out there is yourself.” But they begin to drift apart over the issue of children (he’s very pro, she’s immovably con). Soon Julie meets a guy named Eivind (Nordrum), a goofy looking but lovable barista. Although they’re both attached to other partners, their mutual attraction is too strong to resist. The question, as always with Julie, is whether it’s strong enough to endure.
In telling this story, Trier creates several virtuoso passages — they’re so strong you begin to wonder how long he can keep them coming. There’s a striking sequence — effected without CGI — in which the everyday pedestrians of Oslo freeze in place on the streets and sidewalks on which they’re walking and biking while Julie runs among them looking for Eivind. The drug-ingesting segment of the story is gloriously gruesome (when was the last time anyone even bothered attempting a psychedelic nightmare onscreen?). And the section of the movie in which Julie tells Aksel she’s leaving him — for no pressing reason — allows Lie the emotional space to movingly show us a man who’s being swallowed whole by sorrow.
There’s a terrible plot development toward the end of the movie, and in a quiet, devastating scene, two of the actors rise to the peak of their talents to bring out its dark power. It could have been even darker if Trier were reaching for melodrama; but it’s only life, in its ever-shifting shades, that he’s trying to capture. Unforgettably, he does.
