Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World centres Julie an irreverent, restless and effortlessly charismatic young woman on the edge of thirty. Trier’s film follows Julie through her existential and romantic anxieties, and she seems to be something of a quintessential Cool Girl™️ (of the infamous Gone Girl rant). Reviews have lauded the film as a warm, spirited and feminist coming-of-age film which keenly captures the preoccupations of affluent, older millennials, who are grappling with an extended adolescence of sorts due to economic realities post-2008. And, Trier certainly captures a version of this reality with his warm-hued and immensely romantic film.
However, Trier’s film, a character study of the artist as a young (trendy, millennial and ‘feminist’) woman is merely a vivid façade, as Julie remains only a nebulous version of this character. Renate Reinsve’s wondrous performance manages to bring a compelling spark to a rather hazy character who spends a considerable amount of her energy engrossed by romantic diversions in her life. This would be no problem if the film’s feminist credentials weren’t pointedly emphasised throughout the press-run of the film, with Trier stating: ‘We wanted to make a modern romantic comedy where it’s not about a woman finding a man in order to find purpose in her life’[1]. From the outset however, Julie cycles through brief love affairs with medicine, psychology, photography, and then abandons school altogether. Furthermore, Julie bewilderingly seems to have no friends of her own as she leaves university and even throughout the film, any platonic potentials in her life exist only through Aksel and Eivind, and leave her life along with both those men.
Julie’s feminist ‘edge’ is rather flat and is shaded in by a vague rant on the non-presence of female masturbation in art. Similarly, Julie’s essay, which questionably goes viral on Facebook: ‘Oral Sex in the Time of #MeToo’ (an excerpt of which, is read to the audience by the narrator) appears to be only dimly feminist in the now under-nuanced and outdated mode of 2010s online “choice” feminism. One cannot help but feel as though Julie is only ostensibly the pleasantly unmoored & liberated figure that the film seems desperate to cast her as, especially since we understand so little of her own motivations, courtesy of Trier’s decision to narrate her perspective from a mostly humourless, omniscient narrator.
Finally, as Laura Staab incisively elucidates, the film ends: ‘With misguided satisfaction — a sort of sigh of relief at having ticked the box of ‘woman protagonist’ without having left her either shacked up or fucked up — the film recedes as Julie sits at her computer’[2]. Thus, despite having rather more emotional complexity, and without the genre’s traditional melodrama, Julie remains constrained by the arc of the conventional rom-com heroine. This along with Aksel’s illness and death as a filmic deus ex machina designed to push Julie firmly into the grip of ‘‘Adulthood’’ with an ‘A’ ends up feeling rather uneven and conveniently neat as an ending as we close on a reflective, sober and professionalised Julie.
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/joachim-trier-worst-person-in-the-world-film-rom-com-1235045394/
[2] https://www.anothergaze.com/end-joachim-triers-oslo-trilogy-end-art-community/
