Oslo. Julie (28) first studies medicine, but then changes her mind to study psychology, and then to study photography. She meets a comic book artist, Aksel (44), and starts a relationship with him after he told her they should separate. However, Julie becomes bored with him, too, and starts an affair with Eivind, a coffee barista. When Aksel expresses his wish to have a child, Julie breaks up with him and starts a relationship with Eivind, who breaks up with his girlfriend, the ecological extremist Sunniva. Julie finds out Aksel has pancreatic cancer, and thus breaks up with Eivind. She was pregnant, but lost the fetus is a miscarriage. Aksel dies. Years later, Julie is a film set photographer, and spots Eivind with his wife and child.
“The Worst Person in the World” from the title, at least within the world of this film, is Julie (very good Renate Reinsve), a symbol of ADHD generation that can never be satisfied in the long-term with something and thus always gets bored after a few months, thus destroying two lives of her boyfriends with her spoiled nature, yet she never does it deliberately, which makes her a tragic character who never knows what she really wants in life. Julie thus carries the entire film, an example of the idiom “You can’t sit on two chairs at the same time”, yet she is so indecisive because she doesn’t know how to find her place in the world or what she wants (at one point, she even says she feels only like a supporting character in her own life), which makes the story more human. The film starts off conventionally, slowly, yet it picks up after half an hour and starts to intrigue more. The director Joachim Trier shakes up the stale story with two surreal sequences that liven it up: in the first, poetic one, after her dissatisfaction with boyfriend Aksel, Julie presses the light switch in the kitchen, and time suddenly freezes all around her, as she imagines to flee the apartment, walk on the street through dozens of “frozen” pedestrians, to go to her new love, Eivind, who works in a coffee shop, as the two walk away and spend the night (!) while for everyone else time stopped. In the second one, the nastier, more grotesque one, Julie tries a drug in the apartment, and has weird hallucinations that her young head is on a body of a naked 70-year old woman. Trier also uses humor to expand on these ‘slice-of-life’ characters, such as the funny moment where comic book artist Aksel laments to his acquaintances that the movie poster for his darkly satirical comic book about a lynx has been turned into a kid’s movie akin to Chip and Dale. Not everything works, though. The terminal cancer subplot feels awkwardly misplaced, even though Trier avoided turning it into a melodrama; some plot threads lead nowhere; whereas the script needed better dialogues. Overall, “The Worst Person...” is very good, but there is still something missing to be a truly great film.
Grade:+++
No comments:
Post a Comment