The latest film from Norwegian film director Joachim Trier is a slow, honest meditation on the human instinct to search for truth in romance. The movie has beennominated in the category of Best International Feature Film for the 2022 Oscars, and has otherwise received critical acclaim from audiences all around the world. Presented in 12 chapters, the story follows the adulthood of Julie, played by Renate Reinsve, a free-spirited woman with various ambitions who enters into romantic relationships with two different men across many years.
Though the film has been equally described as a romance and a coming-of-age film, its actual characterization falls between the two categories. It strikes a careful balance between the two, allowing the different approaches to inform one another and create a well-realized vision of what it is like to search for truth as a growing adult.One of the most anticipated movies of 2022,The Worst Person In The Worldis an existential look at how relationships change people, and at how people are changed by their relationships. Here’s what makes it one of the best coming-of-age movies of all time.
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The Crossing of Genres
Unlike many romance movies, the relationship dynamics between Julie and her partners do not make up all the substance of the film. Though her relationships do take center stage during much of its runtime, the real drama is directed towards Julie’s growth and development as a person. Instead, the film’s focus goes toward the various clashes between Julie, her lovers, her family, and the concept of pregnancy. It’s not quite a romance story in the traditional sense, and its vision of an uncertain adulthood effectively weaves together romantic elements with existential anxiety.
The story’s direction has much in common withcoming-of-age movies, which concern themselves more with the effect of romantic love on the growth and development of the story’s protagonists. This is true ofThe Worst Person In The World,where viewers are invited into the mind of Julie and accompany her on her journey to find purpose across different occupations and livelihoods. Inan interview for The Hollywood Reporter, director Joachim Trier commented on the nature of writing a romance movie with the intent of exploring the existential chaos of a relationship. As an intentional divergence from other romance movies, Trier’s vision is realized in the moments where parallel conversations between Julie and her respective partners elicit very different responses and attitudes. These scenes add weight to the messy vulnerability of Julie, whose story is less about finding happiness in a partner than it is about finding your best and worst qualities amplified.
A Date with Fate
As a result of the movie’s crossing of genres, the other leads in the film don’t get the privilege of the audience’s perspective. Aksel and Eivind, both of whom are Julie’s boyfriends at different times, each feel like well-developed characters, but their interests are not necessarily the film’s interests. The perspectives of the male leads are downplayed to the benefit of Julie and her search for truth. She’s driven from decision to decision and partner to partner seemingly at random, the only constant being the time that passes between events. Time is both the source and cause of Julie’s ever-present confusion about where she’d like to be and what she would like to be doing. That confusion spirits her along from moment to moment in a nearly uncomfortable mirror to the randomness that envelops everyone’s existence. In that way, the process of fate all the way from her uncertainty about her profession to her eventual miscarriage makes the randomness of fate more of a partner to her than Aksel or Eivind.
The Intimacy Behind Death
Aksel’s death makes the momentum of the film crawl to a halt, and parts of its latter half are spent in deep contemplation of what it means for the man to meet the end of his life with a cancer diagnosis. As they rekindle some part of the love that existed between them, Julie becomes intimate with his thoughts and feelings at the end of his life. She enters a kind of meditative fugue, coming into contact with the question of her own morality and the impermanence of all things. Her previous intimacy with Aksel informs the intimacy with the process of his death, and endings take on a larger meaning inside the world of the story.Renate Reinsve, lead actress and co-writer, spoke about how Julie is forced to reckon with a mutable self-conceptthrough the context of Aksel’s death, someone who lost the privilege of knowing her so deeply. His death isn’t just an ending to his life, it’s also an end to the person Julie once was.
The concept of death is fittingly the topic that permeates the latter half of the movie alongside Julie’s miscarriage. As a storytelling element, life and death become the final concern of the film, contextualizing her search for truth. As the sun rises following the night of Aksel’s presumed death, Julie stares off into the distance in contemplation of having been so close to someone now departed. Death may be impossible to grasp, but Julie’s story resolves with her finding some measure of closure with it.
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Peace Away From a Relationship
By the end of Julie’s story, she’s single and working as a behind-the-scenes photographer. Presumably, the random forces of fate that caused her miscarriage have left her in a place of acceptance and peace with the events of her life. Unlike otherromances that follow certain American clichés, the source of peace in this story is not in a happy ending for a relationship. The woman that went through three different career shifts in the first ten minutes of the movie is the same woman that looks curiously out of the window at the baby of one of her previous lovers. Though their contexts have become radically different, there’s a sense of continuity between them that makes the ending of this story both unsettling and peaceful. Julie seems comfortable understanding the entropy that has carried her through life. Whether Julie ends up perfectly satisfied could be up to interpretation, there’s no doubt that her journey has prompted growth and change.
