This highly entertaining if unexpectedly shallow character study from the writers of Louder Than Bombs and Thelma concerns Julie (Renate Reinsve), an indecisive twentysomething, who, as The Worst Person in the World opens, is a medical student. No, wait. She’s just changed her major. Hang on. Now, she’s a photographer. Scratch that. She’s somebody’s girlfriend. Then somebody else’s girlfriend.
Julie’s first major love interest is Aksel (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), a successful, contemplative fortysomething cartoonist with a career that allows Julie to live in a well-appointed, hipster-friendly Oslo apartment while she occasionally works in a bookstore. He warns her that their age difference will come between them. And sure enough, his desire to have a child soon sends her hurtling toward Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), a carefree barista who shares Julie’s passion for, well, faffing about and wreaking havoc.
It’s a fascinating concept: an arthouse Manic Pixie Dream Girl narrative told from the pixie’s perspective. The trouble is that Manic Pixie Dream Girls aren’t real.
For all of Reinsve’s energy and beauty, her character is too often defined by the men she bounces off, whether they are her lovers or her intriguingly horrid dad. Julie features in every scene and in varied scenarios without leaving any real sense of who she is. Never mind her youthful indecisiveness: her formlessness makes one think about what Fleabag or Frances Ha might have looked like if those projects were written by two men (as this one was).
Against that, screenwriters Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier have a tremendous talent for crafting classic scenes. The breezy, uninhibited script, which careens from family get-togethers to the Finnmark highlands, marches along to the heroine’s freewheeling step.
It’s endearingly wild all of the time. That unpredictable, millennial-themed chaos doesn’t always make for structural soundness or dramatic satisfaction. The magic mushroom sequence would have been best left on the cutting-room floor. Equally, when Julie is finally faced with consequences, they seem to have wandered in, dourly, from an entirely different film.
Still, many of The Worst Person in the World’s “12 chapters and an epilogue” are among the best short films you could ever wish for. Eivind and Julie’s initial wedding-crashing encounter – in which they do everything except cheat on their respective partners – may be cinema’s greatest meet-cute scene since It Happened One Night. Bounce along as Julie might and it’s a lively, sexy, eventful two-hour adventure.
