A week or so ago, I was bemoaning to a similarly childless friend in his 30s that there aren’t enough movies about people like us. People who have decided that raising children just isn’t for them and, while convinced it is the right decision, feel a sort of nervous tingle as we gaze out at a (hopefully) vast and entirely unmapped future. There just isn’t a lot of guidance for, or reflection of, this condition in film form, precious few considerations of the itchiness of the heart when wondering what shapes life could take without the defining imposition of children.
As sometimes happens here, the Cannes gods seem to have been listening to me, and thus offered up Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s exquisite The Worst Person in the World, a wistful (and downright sad) romantic comedy that tracks a restless woman as she tips over into her 30s and tries to understand her restlessness. Trier, a far-ranging and technically ambitious director, returns to the more earthbound climes of his earlier films, eschewing Thelma’s supernatural allegory and the overladen pretensions of Louder Than Bombs.
The sparkling Renate Reinsve plays Julie, a happy dilettante living in Oslo who is 29 at the beginning of the film. Oh, what a horrid waiting room that age is, the glorious ascent of your 20s mostly behind you, what looks like a plateau stretching out ahead. Though, in Julie’s case, her ascent was a little less than glorious. She zigged among a variety of academic disciplines and big career plans and now simply works at a bookstore, content enough in her life as she dates men and regards the world with a graceful bemusement. She falls into a relationship with an older comic book artist, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, tender and dark all at once), whose relatively glamorous life offers safe cover for Julie to explore the world somewhat passively, tucked under a wing and peeking out, but not risking a lot.
Trier’s film is divided up into little chapters, each with a clever or suggestive title. These almost-vignettes follow the rise and fall of Julie and Aksel’s romance and then beyond. There is a sustained encounter with another man—the goofier, more easygoing Eivind (Herbert Nordrum, winsome and sweet)—and then a dramatic turn that more explicitly, and persuasively, lays out the movie’s themes. Trier pulls a lot of stylistic tricks in the film, but they somehow never play like gimmicks, like adornments merely there to show off the talent of their creator. The film has a lilting, lively rhythm; the glimpses we see of months and years in Julie’s life ably provide a whole picture.
Julie doesn’t know what she wants. But she knows that she will keep wanting, and that she is not craving any of the typical punctuation points of adulthood, like, say, having kids. Sure, a steady relationship is nice, but even the comforts provided by domestic romance feel too fixed, too determined. Julie seems allergic to the idea of life becoming so ordered, honed into one set path forever. Which is a relatable feeling for those of us who wound up in our 30s still as relatively on the wind as we were in our 20s. Is there something wrong with us? Are we selfish, always looking for more when something reliable and good, great even, is right in front of us? Or, are we bucking conservative tradition and bravely setting a new, individualist path?
The film kind of answers “yes” and “no” to all of those questions, depicting Julie’s choices in their full breadth. She can be self-involved, blithe about other people’s needs, stubborn and frustrating. But so can we all. And Julie is also admirably good about listening to herself, even if that inner voice is so often confused. The Worst Person in the World argues that her aimlessness can be just as valuable, just as worthy, as another person’s certainty. The journey of the film—or, one of the journeys—is Julie embracing the idiosyncrasy of her being. She doesn’t refuse to learn from experience, but she allows herself to bounce off it at angles all her own. What’s developed over the course of the film is a sense of personal understanding, which may be (for some, anyway) the true education of adulthood—the shape of life may, actually, be the shape of you.
Trier’s writing is sharp and specific. He offers up difficult things with a shrewd balance of teasing and empathy. Even the title of The Worst Person in the World is a forgiving joke, ironic hyperbole as comforting chuckle. Reinsve is a perfect interpreter of the film’s tone, luminously embodying Julie’s grand and human jumble. By the time the film’s quiet and hopeful epilogue arrived, I’d swooned and been shattered and, maybe, been seen. I went drifting out of the theater with Trier’s closing song choice, Art Garfunkel’s cover of “Waters of March,” fizzing softly in my ears. The song is essentially just a list of words and ideas rambling on, which is an apt way to score the end of a film that finds such beauty in all the emerging grain and variation of being alive. Isn’t all that, for some of us, quite enough?
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