The Worst Person in the World

 During a climactic argument in Chasing Amy, the heroine, challenged about her past sexual encounters, says:  "I was an experimental girl, for Christ's sake!  Maybe you knew early what track you were on from A to B but, unlike you, I wasn't given a map at birth and, so, I tried it all."  This snippet of dialogue captures some of the qualities of protagonist, Julie, of The Worst Person in the World.  (The film is a 2021 romantic comedy that slips into sobriety and, even, mourning at the end of the picture; directed by Joachim Trier and made in Norway the movie features the luminous Renate Reinsve as the picture's "experimental girl".)  The picture is an even-tempered and mild-mannered portrait of an attractive woman -- she sometimes seems very young and, at other times, appears to be almost middle-aged -- involved in a romantic triangle:  the film depicts her relationship with two men, Aksel, a writer of underground comix, who imagines himself a perpetual rebel and insurgent -- in fact, he's rather bourgeois -- and Eivind, a gawky guy who is also trapped in a fantasy of perpetual youth:  he's underemployed as a coffee barista in downtown Oslo.  The film is charming and, certainly, entertaining enough -- it starts in the Annie Hall mode as a character study of a fascinating young woman; at first, the tone is pure Woody Allen, blithe with brittle-seeming intellectuals, well-stocked book cases, and clever, funny repartee (making small talk at a party, Julie claims that she's a doctor and that "cuddling children" will turn them into drug addicts, an assertion that terrorizes the perfectionist Norwegian mothers with whom she is talking.).  In the last part of the film, mortality intervenes and the movie takes a considerably more somber turn when one of the characters is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and dies.  Parts of the movie are satiric and malicious -- the character of Julie is like a Jane Austen heroine if one of those characters had achieved some notoriety for posting on-line a short story about fellatio.  (The two male characters are fans of the story although one wonders to what extent self-interest plays a role in their approbation.)

Trier is consciously literary and he structures the film into 12 chapters, each neatly entitled and separated by some black frames from one another with both a prologue and an epilogue.  In the prologue, we see Julie in college and observe her flitting from one vocation to another:  first, she wants to be a doctor, then, a psychologist and counsel, and, finally, a photo-journalist, although she really doesn't achieve anything in photography until the end of the movie.  She enters a relationship with the underground comix guy Aksel -- he has made comic books about a feral and subversive bobcat ("Guape").At a party celebrating a new publication by Aksel, Julie gets bored, and wanders away.  Festive occasions in Oslo are celebrated on a high green hill overlooking the city where there is an elegant esplanade.  (In the film's first shot, we see Julie in a black party dress in profile against the backdrop of the bluff and harbor below on one of Oslo's endless pale summer nights.  The scene is repeated twenty minutes in the movie -- this is the image showing Julie's escape from Aksel.) Julie crashes a wedding party also in a house atop the bluff where she meets Eivind.  They are both drunk and they play a little game in which the objective is to see how intimate they can get with one another without actually having sex -- the answer, by the way, is "pretty intimate" since they take turns watching one another urinate.  There are several more parties in the film.  In one of them, Aksel takes Julie to meet his friends, most of whom have children.  He wants to have a child with Julie. The married couples fight, and both Aksel and Julie are embarrassed.  When Julie, drunkenly says, "let's make a baby", Aksel doesn't seem to take her encouragement to heart.  Julie has lied to Eivind about being a doctor.  She actually works as clerk in a bookstore.  She is upset to see Eivind come into the store.  We are later shown that he's with Sunniva, a woman who wants a book on "Green Yoga".  There's a flashback to Sunniva and Eivind camping on a desolate mountain in Finnmark.  Eivind has done a genetics test through Ancestry and discovered that she has 3.6% Sami blood.  This turns her into a Sami shaman and ritual practitioner as well as an environmentalist; Eivind struggles to keep up her with modish shamanic rituals, her yoga practice as a teacher and her environmental activism.  Ultimately, when Eivind breaks up with Sunniva to live with Julie, he condemns himself as a traitor to her and the climate -- that is, "the worst person in the world."  Julie is in love with Eivind -- who she imagines in a startling sequence as the only person in the whole world:  everyone else is paralyzed and motionless.  She breaks up with Aksel who worships her.  It's a sad and disturbing scene:  poor Aksel is left wearing a shirt but without pants or underpants when she walks out on him.  Julie doesn't have a gift for happiness.  She quarrels with Eivind whom she denounces as shiftless.  Then, she learns that Aksel has pancreatic cancer and is dying.  She visits him on several occasions.  He announces to her that she is the great love of his life.  He is morose and terrified and, later, we seem him enduring pain.  Julie gets Aksel to talk about his childhood -- they do a sort of nostagia tour of Oslo and Julie takes pictures of him with her large Canon camera.  Aksel dies and Julie is with Eivind. She's pregnant with Eivind's child and decides to have the child.  But she miscarries.  In the epilog, we see Julie taking publicity photos on the set of a movie that seems to echo some of the themes and aspects of the film we have been watching.  The actress in the movie goes outside where she meets Eivind who is holding their baby.  

This summary doesn't capture the pictorial ingenuity of the film or its complexity.  Julie's parents are divorced.  Her father seems to be a pathological liar -- he lies but it doesn't matter because no one believes him in the first instance.  There's a scene in which Julie with friends takes mushrooms and has vivid and frightening hallucinations -- she's in an old woman's body suckling an infant.  There are interesting and baffling visual motifs -- in an early scene, Aksel shows Julie a window in his apartment that has thick crazed glass; when he's dying, Aksel shows Julie tinted windows, stained glass, in a childhood flat.  We see Oslo through those red, blue, and yellow panes.  When Aksel says that Julie was the love of his life and the reason he wants to keep living, she's too honest to reciprocate -- he is obviously not the love of her life. (There's a painful detail:  Julie cuddles with Aksel in his hospital bed, but when he puts his hand on her breast, she nonchalantly brushes it aside.)  When Aksel asks her if she was faithful to him, she also wounds him with her honesty, admitting that she was involved with Eivind when they were together.  Aksel's comic is adapted into a Christmas movie called Guape ruins Christmas, obviously an atrocious corruption of his work.  The picture is beautifully shot.  It doesn't add up to a whole lot --  but it's an effectively mounted work and very compelling.  Julie isn't the worst person in the world, nor is she a "very good person" as Aksel says -- but she's vibrant with life and no better nor worse than most of us.