The Oscar Nominated (Best International Film, Original Screenplay) Film, The Worst Person in the World Opens Friday!
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"Julie’s a bit of a mess. When we meet her, she has no sooner enrolled in pre-med courses at a Norwegian university than she’s shifted her major to psychology — no wait, art. She’s all over the map. Her love life is just as prone to last-minute switchbacks. To paraphrase the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, she doesn’t know what she wants until she screws it up.
"As portrayed by the luminous Renate Reinsve in “The Worst Person in the World,” Julie takes “relatable” to a new and transcendent level. The movie — a shimmering, generous, exhilarating coming-of-young-middle-age tale — wraps itself around her like the multicolored throw she brings with each apartment move. Julie is Everywoman as work-in-progress: a restless, protean creature whose outward mien of self-possession disguises the impulses at her molten core.
"Written and directed by Joachim Trier — and nominated for two Oscars this week, for Trier and Eskil Vogt’s screenplay and for best international feature — “The Worst Person in the World” unfolds with a linear straightforwardness that belies its exuberant wildness. Ostensibly, the movie chronicles Julie’s attempts to find herself, a search that is complicated by her relationship with an older, famous cartoonist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), her ambivalence about becoming a mother and unresolved issues with her own family of origin. While Aksel enjoys the renown of being an avatar of pop-culture edginess (while preparing to have his comic book adapted into a mainstream movie), Julie works as a clerk in a bookstore, at one point writing an essay that promises to vault her into viral celebrity. It doesn’t, but the ideas she’s percolating — about the sexist taboos around representing female desire and physicality — will be revisited by Trier in some of the movie’s most dazzling and memorable scenes.
"Reinsve, who won best actress at Cannes last year and came thisclose to getting an Oscar nomination herself, delivers a disarmingly open, sensuous and unguarded performance throughout “The Worst Person in the World,” whose title alert viewers will recognize as a canny misdirect. That description actually belongs to another character, who shows up midway through the film to derail Julie’s best laid plans (or what passes for them in a life that seems to float from one not-quite-milestone to the next). Later in the film, someone calls Julie “a d--- good person,” which doesn’t seem to fit her either: If “The Worst Person in the World” has a fault, it’s in a character who, despite Reinsve’s captivating portrayal, ultimately feels underwritten to the point of vapidity.
"Then again, that’s no doubt by design: Julie herself is still underwritten, a blank slate looking for chalk in places that — lucky for viewers — all happen to be located in contemporary Oslo. As he’s done in past movies like “Reprise” and “Oslo, August 31st” (both of which also star Lie), Trier pays affectionate homage to his hometown, following his aimless but always compelling heroine through some of the city’s most attractive precincts as she waits for inspiration to strike.
"He also demonstrates his facility with film language — at its most subtle and, a few scenes later, its most go-for-broke. In one scene, a lifetime of heartbreak, emotional distance and hard-won resilience is captured in the simple act of receiving a stingingly careless birthday gift. The moment is small, finely observed and exquisite in its detail. Later, Trier delivers emotional truth just as convincingly in sequences that are trippy, visionary and utterly recognizable.
“The Worst Person in the World” takes a startling turn in the third act that gives it unexpected pathos and gravitas, with Reinsve and Lie making it into a shattering but strangely gorgeous two-hander. What’s been a feather-light exploration of young-personhood deepens and widens, with stunning results. Trier and Reinsve have gifted audiences with a movie that understands the ecstasy of diving into the unknown, the flush of new love, the beauty of connecting amid unspeakable loss. Even at its most fanciful, “The Worst Person in the World” stays grounded in what it means to be human."
- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
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