The Apartment, which recently screened at Crosstown Arts, is the greatest romantic comedy of all time. Director Billy Wilder created a pair of star-crossed lovers, played by Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, who feel lost among the skyscrapers of New York, and only find belonging with each other. The razor-sharp screenplay lets Bud and Fran make bad choices, and invites you to root for them to make the right ones, even while you’re not sure they actually have the courage to choose each other.
That deeply humane approach is apparent in Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s new film, The Worst Person in the World. When we first meet Julie (Renate Reinsve), she’s a medical student in Oslo who seemingly has everything. Then, she makes an impulsive decision to quit med school and pursue her dreams. Except that, she doesn’t really know what her dreams are, since she recently believed it was to become a doctor. At first, she tries majoring in psychology, but that only lasts until she has an affair with one of her professors. When scrolling through her iPhone photos, she decides she’s got a pretty good eye, and decides to ditch psychology for photography.
One fringe benefit of her new direction is that she gets to date models instead of stuffy academics, and run in circles with much more engaging people. That’s where she meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a successful comic artist who has just cut a movie deal. Julie is impressed with Aksel’s confidence, and finds herself attracted to the good looking, intelligent guy, even after she finds out he’s 15 years her senior. For his part, Aksel likes her spunky energy, and basks in her attention. The two hit it off, and the next time we see them, they’re living together, she’s meeting Aksel’s parents, and he wants to talk about having kids.
That’s a lot of plot to fit into the first two segments of a story that spans 12 chapters, an intro, and a epilog, but Trier is nothing if not economical in his storytelling. The Worst Person in the World follows Julie as she stumbles through the world, never entirely sure about what she wants or how to get it. Reinsve is instantly likable, and it’s fun to follow along while she crashes parties and trips on mushrooms, in a scene which allows Trier to give his experimental tendencies room to run. Aksel helps Julie gain confidence in herself, but his arrogance wears thin after a while, and she starts casting about for someone else, even before she consciously realizes what she’s doing. Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) is much closer to Julie’s age, and the two of them seem to share some kind of strange magnetism when they meet. Unfortunately, he’s married to Sunniva (Maria Grazia Di Meo), so their single meeting looks like it will be their last — until it’s not.
The episodic structure makes The Worst Person in the World feel a bit like a loose collection of short films than a coherent feature film, but Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt have a deft touch. They choose exactly the right story beats to illustrate Julie’s years-long character arc, as she turns 30 while still struggling to figure out her place in the world, and who she wants by her side. The central love triangle of Reinsve, Lie, and Nordrum is so strong that Trier can go on flights of fancy and still remain grounded and relatable. The ending, which I will not spoil here, seemed anticlimactic at first, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. This film seems like a rom-com on the surface, but it’s really about Julie learning to accept herself, and learning that she’s not, as she calls herself, the worst person in the world. My biggest beef is that, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, there seems to be an awful lot of unnecessary running going on.
But maybe that’s just how they do it in Oslo, a very pedestrian-oriented city with lots of easily accessible public transportation. This is the third film in what Trier calls his Oslo trilogy, in which the city itself is the only recurring character. He photographs the verdant city with the affection and knowledge of a longtime resident, which really made me want to visit, and maybe crash a wedding or two.
The Worst Person in the World is now playing at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill.
