The Worst Per­son in the World

There’s a line first coined by Amer­i­can writer Allen Saun­ders, pop­u­larised in John Lennon’s ​‘Beau­ti­ful Boy’: ​“Life is what hap­pens to you while you’re busy mak­ing oth­er plans.” Few film­mak­ers have man­aged to illus­trate this wry tru­ism as well as Joachim Tri­er, who with the final film in his Oslo tril­o­gy con­cludes a decade-long study of the highs and lows of young adulthood.

This time his sub­ject is Julie (Renate Reinsve), a tal­ent­ed young woman whose life, in the years lead­ing up to her thir­ti­eth birth­day, is chron­i­cled in 12 chapters.

Mean­der­ing between study­ing med­i­cine and psy­chol­o­gy to dab­bling in pho­tog­ra­phy while she works at a book­shop, Julie encoun­ters accom­plished car­toon­ist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) who, after they sleep togeth­er for the first time, tells her they should break it off. ​“We’re only going to hurt each oth­er,” he says. Julie agrees, and pro­ceeds to fall in love.

All is well, until she realis­es she needs more out of life than being defined as someone’s girl­friend. A ran­dom act of mis­chief sends her into the orbit of affa­ble barista Eivind (Her­bert Nor­drum), which caus­es fur­ther doubt in her mind about her future with Aksel.

While the love tri­an­gle at the cen­tre of the film might form the cen­tral thread of The Worst Per­son in the World, it would be remiss to describe the film sole­ly as a romance, or even a roman­tic com­e­dy. It’s true that Tri­er and co-writer Eskil Vogt reflect as poet­i­cal­ly on the com­plex nature of rela­tion­ships, yet there’s some­thing spell­bind­ing about the way these obser­va­tions tie into a wider explo­ration of life itself: our ties to oth­ers can’t define us; we’re born alone and die alone, so the life­long jour­ney is to find out who we are, and try to live com­fort­ably with that.

Yet straight­for­ward bil­dungsro­man isn’t real­ly Trier’s style. Instead, the film chan­nels the unpre­dictable, some­times mag­i­cal, often cru­el real­i­ty of liv­ing in the here and now. A thor­ough­ly mod­ern movie, there are explo­rations of hot but­ton top­ics includ­ing #MeToo, polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness and envi­ron­men­tal­ism, woven togeth­er with such ease that it avoids becom­ing a screed.

To watch this in tan­dem with Reprise and Oslo, August 31^st is to see not only the growth of a city, but the evo­lu­tion of us. The growth of how humans see and under­stand one anoth­er. This phi­los­o­phy about mod­ern life and romance is pack­aged gor­geous­ly, with Kasper Tuxen’s sun­ny cin­e­matog­ra­phy, but it’s a char­ac­ter study for the ages, with Reinsve, Danielsen Lie and Nor­drum deliv­er­ing three mag­net­ic turns.

Tri­er under­stands both the eupho­ria of liv­ing and the banal­i­ty of lone­li­ness, and that no mat­ter how much we think we know, the uni­verse always finds a way to wrong­foot us. Cathar­sis comes in accept­ing our own small­ness in the cos­mos, and life’s only con­stant is its abil­i­ty to sur­prise us.

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