THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD. Not Ruled By Chance

Meet Annie Hall… sorry. Meet Julie! A student fascinated by surgery. Though maybe not entirely. The body is the body, but what’s inside the head matters more. Meet Julie! An active participant in lectures, in love with psychology. Yet a human being is more than the demons that torment them in their dreams. Meet Julie! An aspiring photographer who feels perfectly at home with artistic portraits. It is photographs that most precisely draw out the human interior. Meet Julie! A diligent, though slightly scatterbrained, bookstore employee. Daily contact with books, with literary fiction, opens one’s eyes. There, all the masters of the pen, the intellectual guides, are within arm’s reach. Don’t think, however, that The Worst Person in the World is about everything.

Joachim Trier’s film is a story of our present day, divided into twelve chapters (plus a prologue, plus an epilogue). It is about smartphone addiction, worldview skirmishes, singles and couples, infidelities and marriages, having a child and the eternal, irresolvable conflict between what is expected or dreamed of and what we actually receive from the grayness of life.

Thirty years old. Not many meaningful professional successes on the CV, more partners—more or less accidental—than that: for a night, a day, a week, a month. The only thing that can compete with the number of relationships is the number of degree programs started or files containing ideas for the next great novel. There are many threads, characters, and conversations in The Worst Person in the World, but Trier’s film is not ruled by chance. It is a carefully thought-out narrative composition that, through individual predicaments, concentrates many contemporary flaws and sociological traps. The most important of these is an excess of possibilities, an accumulation of opportunities, and being overwhelmed by the sheer number of stimuli.

They keep coming, constantly and incessantly. In notifications on the phone screen, in information-bombarding media, in the lustful glances of strangers, in the awkward conversations with aging parents. All of them demand some kind of response. With greater or lesser commitment. Following the voice of the heart, or pretending to do so for someone. More than once, a paraphrased sentence circulates that “it’s so hard to keep pretending everything is OK.”

It is never OK. Julie’s first lover—Aksel—has knowledge, skills, knows philosophers, knows history, understands difficult concepts, knows writers. A perfect companion for wine-fueled discussions, but less satisfying when it comes to everyday cuddling. Eivind, on the other hand, will comfort you, hold you, take your hand, provide the right amount of tenderness and warmth—but he probably last went to the theater in the first grade of elementary school. Working in a café doesn’t boost his reputation either. In one relationship there is an agreement not to have a child; in the other, it is a recurring, uncomfortable topic. The director attentively follows every step of the lost Julie, but in truth his film is a diagnosis of her entire generation.

Are you struggling at university, professionally, in relationships, with your health, with your parents, with your inner self? Joachim Trier probably won’t give you answers, but he should offer a perspective worth considering—a comment, or a small word of reassurance. I won’t deny The Worst Person in the World its therapeutic potential.

Julie, like Allen’s Annie Hall, never finds fulfillment. In every possible scenario, something is missing. She feels that something is slipping away, that another escape is necessary. So she peers around every corner, because an opportunity may be lurking there (perhaps a flight into space, perhaps an intriguing flirt), a chance for a little more happiness. A possibility to breathe for a moment, to interrupt the constant searching. A question of an entirely different order is whether a prolonged status quo would worry her far more—whether it would extinguish her vital force and the spark in her eyes. One thing is certain, however: Julie is not the worst person in the world. Many would also agree that, all things considered, this is not the worst world for a human being either.