Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Director: Joachim Trier
Quick Impressions:
I’ve heard great things about this film, and I’ve been meaning to watch it all week. I get a bit obsessive when I’m writing productively, though, and I’ve been so focused on the new book I’m working on that the week just flew by, and I never had time to watch a movie until Saturday.
A friend of mine with impeccable taste loved this movie (I think). Actually all I really remember is that she saw it. (I don’t like to get someone else’s take on a film I might review before I’ve watched it myself.) I did accidentally see someone online call this a Norwegian Annie Hall. I can’t remember who said it. I deliberately did not read any elaboration on the comment. I wanted to form my own reaction to the film first.
And I have to say, I had a strong reaction to The Worst Person in the World. While I was watching it, I enjoyed the whole thing. Then the ending (maybe the last thirty minutes or so) made me so violently enraged that I was angry for two hours! Maybe it was only one hour. It felt like two hours’ worth of rage, though, nearly silent but so intense, so dramatic. I left the room! I stormed upstairs, ducked into our bedroom, and started vehemently texting my husband.
Finally he came after me and asked sweetly, “What are you doing?”
“I’m texting you!” I replied, still texting him. (I don’t know how he didn’t know that. He was answering the texts!)
What upset me most was the baffling intensity of my own reaction. (It was way over-the-top! I started wondering, “Is there some trauma in my childhood that I don’t know about? If we start free-associating as an exercise like in the movie Marnie, am I going to start freaking out until I finally remember the murder of Bruce Dern?”)
But then something very weird happened as we talked.
“Someone said that was a Norwegian Annie Hall,” I said.
“Why?” my husband wondered. “That didn’t remind me of Annie Hall at all.”
“Well,” I floundered, “there were no lobsters, so I assume because they had a relationship and then it ended.”
Suddenly this turned into a huge joke. “That could be any movie!” he cried incredulously. “That could be Titanic. They had a relationship, then it ended.” (There were probably lobsters involved there, too.)
Inexplicably, this became the funniest thing ever as we found more and more movies that were like Annie Hall (in that someone had a relationship, and then it ended). Then we widened our scope to include non-movies. There is not a single thing on Earth, movie or not, that can’t be summed up this way to some degree. (“It’s like Anakin and the Younglings!” “It’s like E.T. and Elliot!” “It’s like Benedict Arnold and Major John André!” “It’s like the Axis Powers!” “It’s like the family in The Shining!”)
We laughed so hard. And then I started talking about how much I’d loved the party crashing scene and began making comparisons to The Great Beauty.
So I came back downstairs in a great mood and found my daughter storming around angrily because the movie had absolutely enraged her, too.
The Good:
If you want to feel something, watch The Worst Person in the World. The last part of the movie deeply angered my husband, my daughter, and me. I’m not sure how to describe this, but we all felt it. I haven’t had such a strong reaction to a movie in a very long time. (Other films that have provoked this level of intense, emotional response in me include The Shape of Things…Actually that may be all. I watched that on TV with my sister, and we were like, “WHAT?!”)
I hardly know where to start because many of the most enraging qualities of this film are actually things it’s doing well (if you ask me. My daughter feels differently).
“I feel like that movie was a little too cynical,” she complained.
“In what way?” I asked. (I love hearing her unfiltered insights.)
“In the way that everyone sucks,” she said and elaborated, “Annie Hall was like, ‘Even if a romance ends, you can still appreciate your life and your time together.’ This movie was like, ‘If you’re flawed…guess you suck!’”
Now granted, she is thirteen, so she’s perhaps in the wrong stage of life to appreciate the film. She’s still growing up and figuring out what she wants. She has dreams of a bright future.
She said, “That movie started off like it was really inspiring me to do something, and then at the end, it was like, ‘Guess I’d better not do anything then.’”
“Don’t you think the movie is deliberately cultivating that response, though?” I asked.
It definitely is. That’s why I can’t be too mad at it myself. The film is trying for something, and it’s achieving it. We watch the beginning and feel all of the protagonist’s youthful (misguided, confused, naïve) drive and energy. We gently laugh with Julie at herself. (If you’re an adult, you kind of see the way things are headed.)
The film replicates the experience of adulthood in some ways. I said to my daughter, “When you’re young, you start out by knowing exactly what you want,” like the little girl who doesn’t want to go to bed, “but by the time you get older…”
“But why do I care?” she demanded. Her point was that we all know that the world is full of problems. Why should we care about Julie’s? My daughter feels that we all must make these discoveries for ourselves. (I don’t want to spoil the movie, but Julie’s ultimate choices suggest that perhaps she feels the same way. Why else would she keep throwing certain things away and turn to a career that forces her to focus outward?)
My daughter went on to say that she feels the same way about “all those war movies that won Oscars.” I think her point is that something so personal must be experienced for the full impact to be felt. Otherwise, personal epiphanies in fiction are often wasted on the audience members who have not experienced such things themselves.
As we learn in the opening credits, lead actress Renate Reinsve won Best Actress at Cannes, and it’s easy to see why. She’s fantastic. I would have watched an entire movie of her walking around aimlessly crashing parties. In fact, she’s so good that I’m surprised that she didn’t make it into the Best Actress lineup at the Oscars, too (though, admittedly, that category is extremely crowded this year).
Best Scene:
My personal favorite is the scene where Julie crashes what appears to be a wedding reception. (It may be just a party.) Somehow this perfectly captures the way I always feel when I walk into any party. (In fact, I watched and thought with a shudder, “Thank God I don’t have to go to any more parties!”) (In grad school, someone throws a party every weekend. It’s so stressful! If you don’t go, it looks like you don’t want to be friends with the people who invited you!)
(When I was telling my husband I related to the party part, he joked, “Hopefully no one sniffs you.” I explained, “Usually I spend parties talking to the host’s dog! So that actually speaks to my experience, too!”) (A casual friend in grad school once apologized to me when she had to rehome her dog because she knew how much I liked interacting with him at her parties.) (The funny part of all this is that I’m afraid of dogs. But I’m more afraid of people, I guess.)
This scene really spoke to me. For one thing, I can remember on multiple occasions having random thoughts like, “What if I just picked up that cigarette lying in the gutter and acted like I’d been smoking it and knocked on a stranger’s door?” “What if I just left this party and wandered away and crashed a stranger’s party?” (I hate parties!) (To escape a party, I’d do anything, even go to another party!)
And I have a longstanding fantasy about discovering someone exciting on the bed in the coat room. (At parties where there are no dogs, I frequently find myself in the coat room. It’s very exciting when someone wanders in there. And what if someone tried to sneak into a party that way and hid under the coats? There’s a scene like that in a novel I wrote in my twenties.)
So I liked that scene a lot, especially because she just wanders in like, “Why look! It’s my best friend! A glass of wine!”
Best Action Sequence:
I like the scene when Aksel is pouring coffee, and Julie makes him (and everyone else in town) freeze. I wish I had this power because I’m very slow at processing and often need excessive amounts of time to think. This is a pretty effective way of conveying what’s going on inside her head to viewers.
I also love the moment when Julie looks around the room at people and family pictures and gives us a rundown of what all the women in her whole family were doing at thirty.
Best Scene Visually:
The mushrooms scene is memorable, and the interlude with Sunniva’s voyage of self-discovery is funny, but I related most to a moment when a problem self-resolves in the shower. (I’ve had this happen to me, too. I thought, “Oh no! I was wrong! I’m not ready to do this again,” and then suddenly the situation changed, and I was filled with all sorts of weird, conflicting emotions. (And then I thought, “I’m in some kind of shock or denial because I feel like this is still happening.” But then it turned out that, surprise! It was still happening. What I saw in the shower didn’t match up with what later bloodwork said. But then those numbers meant that something might be in the wrong place. It kept dragging on and on, and my feelings were so conflicted and all over the place.) I don’t want to spoil the movie, so I can’t say as much about this scene as I’d like to, but I thought it was well done. It really resonated with me.
The Negatives:
Why is a film with such pointed emphasis on seeing things from a woman’s point of view written by two men?
Normally that kind of thing wouldn’t bother me. I do think men can write women convincingly. A great writer should be able to write about all kinds of people they’re not. (You can’t be everyone!) (Seriously, I am usually not concerned with these things. I frequently feel intense guilt for not being as much of a feminist as the world probably needs me to be.)
But come on! There’s so much emphasis in this film on Julie’s writing of her own experience. She’s tired of hearing about erectile dysfunction and prostate problems. She wants to hear about periods and fertility and anxieties about motherhood and sex from her own point of view and tampons…
Okay, but two men wrote this movie. (Is that why it’s like Annie Hall? It’s all about a younger woman from the perspective of an older man?)
In the end, Julie even ends up not writing (despite the fact that the men tell her she’s good at it; and then she reacts to their wisdom so poorly!). I have trouble trusting this movie because it’s pretending to be about a woman giving her own perspective, but it’s not (which makes it seem a bit insidious. Instead of reflections on one’s own shortcomings and personal growth, it’s actually more like, “Young women! Amiright?”) I don’t like that. I don’t like it as a woman. And I don’t like it as a writer. It’s the most dishonest thing I’ve ever seen (especially this idea of, “You don’t know this yet, but I do because I’ve dated so, so, so many women, and so I’ve learned the secret of who you are from knowing them, and now I can predict all your behavior. Oh look! I predicted it!”) (The more I think about that, the more offensive I find it, and I am not usually offended by such things.) If this film were autobiographical and written by a woman, I would like it a lot more.
I feel like there’s this implication of:
“Women these days just don’t know what they want.” –a man
That’s just off-putting. I want to like the movie, but why must it have this as a theme? All of the female characters are made fun of—the child having a tantrum, the stressed mother, the woman who wants to save the environment. When the journalists are talking with Aksel about his book, he is the one who looks unreasonable. But then we learn he is under extreme duress. Our sympathies shift back to him. It’s very manipulative.
Also I feel this protagonist must be having some kind of contest with Bradley Cooper’s character in Nightmare Alley to see who can behave in the most objectionable way. (He wins, of course. He’s an outright murderer.)
I feel her behavior toward her ex near the end of the film is somewhat inexcusable. I literally cannot believe that anybody in their right mind would behave this way. How can she think this is an appropriate way to behave? I don’t want to get into specifics. (I suppose I myself have received validation from a man under somewhat similar circumstances, but not really. (I mean the circumstances aren’t that similar.) I mean, if I had parted with someone in the way that these two did, for the reasons that they did, and then I found myself in the position that she’s in, I would not come to him, given the circumstances that she knows he is facing, to ask for his reassurance. I find that behavior borderline sociopathic. It’s so inconsiderate.)
My husband stopped liking the moving at this point, too. “I was with her until then,” he told me, “but I don’t understand how she could do that to him!”
But then my husband said a bit more. He said, “She wasted his time and prevented him from,” achieving a goal of his.
And then I was like, “Wait a minute. He was forty years old when he met her!”
And see, the thing is, if this were a personal reflection written by a female screenwriter, if it were autobiographical, I’d say, “Well, she gave him what she could. She couldn’t do what he wanted, but she created a way for him, and for all of his memories to live on, and then she reflected on her behavior, and she wrote this movie for him.”
But no, two men wrote this movie! That’s really weird, and I’m surprised the film is as well received as it seems to be since this is 2022. The movie focuses so intently on a woman frustrated because men keep telling her what she thinks and feels, what she should do, what she will do. (I want to tell her, “Of course you feel like that! You’re actually a fictional character in a movie written by two men!”) (Is it meant to be confessional and apologetic on the part of the male writers?)
(I will grant that Julie keeps discarding her own writing, claiming that she wants a voice and then ultimately deciding not to share it because she doesn’t have the confidence or doesn’t believe in herself. I guess somebody’s got to share her thoughts. Why not the people who keep fishing them out of the trash!)
To be fair, Penélope Cruz won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for Parallel Mothers, another film about a woman written by a man. I believe that film. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest bit that Pedro Almodóvar wrote that part for Cruz. I just think, “What a genius he is! What a great actress she is! She’s so lucky she has him writing for her and vice versa.” But that film doesn’t seem quite as mean spirited toward its protagonist as this one. She also does some awful things. (In fact, she probably does much worse things. Julie is doing just fine until she abruptly makes her late conversation with her ex all about her in a way that is particularly insensitive to him. Maybe I just like Parallel Mothers better because it’s funnier. This one is funny at the start, but then the humor dramatically drops off near the end of the film. It doesn’t make you laugh again until it’s been over for at least an hour.)
It seems almost ridiculous that in 2022 there must be a two-hour movie about a woman deciding not to have a baby. The reason this seems ridiculous is that Julie basically decides right away. From the start, she’s like, “You know, I don’t think I want to have a baby.” Then for some reason, the entire world doesn’t believe her and makes her feel guilty about it for the rest of her life. (My sister has never wanted to have kids, so she didn’t have any. Now she doesn’t have kids. She is glad she doesn’t have kids because she didn’t want any. That doesn’t stop people from asking her about it, though. Why women must always defend themselves about this is a great mystery of our bizarre, broken society. You also get criticized and judged for having “too many” kids. I would be more receptive to a film about Julie not being completely sure she doesn’t want to have a baby if Julie herself had written the story, though.)
Granted the film is not solely about the protagonist not wanting children. She also doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life. (That’s most of us!) For some reason, even as she rails that her own experiences are valuable and worthy of being written about and read/seen, she also keeps undermining her own efforts to let others read about/see them. (That’s me, for sure!) I understand why she does it. This is a very relatable problem.
I’ll probably watch the film again, to be honest, because I don’t think I’m evaluating it fairly. It evoked such a strong, visceral reaction in all three of us that I think we lost objectivity. The very fact that it evoked such a strong reaction in three separate people must mean that it’s doing something right. As foreign films go, though, I prefer Drive My Car. (For Original Screenplay, I would choose either King Richard or Belfast, both beautifully written.)
I just read my husband this review, and we have now been discussing the film for an hour. He points out that although Julie’s encounter with her ex made us both livid, perhaps it was actually kind of her to point out to him that although she is in such a situation, she is deeply ambivalent about it. In other words, she has not changed. What she (repeatedly) said to him was true. It is not some random thing that broke them up. They are truly incompatible in terms of something that is usually a deal-breaker in most relationships (simply because true compromise on this issue is not possible if it leaves either party resentful).
He then speculated, “Didn’t your boyfriend in college tell you that your hair was the best thing about you and say that when you dyed your hair, you ruined yourself, and that dyeing your hair meant you still didn’t know who you were as a person? Maybe that’s what set you off.” While this is perfectly true, it is also true that I replied, “Maybe you don’t know who I am as a person. This means that I temporarily changed the color of my hair.” If I’m still that upset about that situation almost twenty-five years later, then there’s no hope for me! I’m far more likely to be upset about how you treat someone in Aksel’s situation or…who knows, actually! I really for the life of me cannot figure out why this film enraged me so much. I didn’t even know it was written by two men until I began writing this review, and I find Julie broadly sympathetic in most scenes. I am confused about why she keeps throwing away her writing, but that doesn’t explain much either. Maybe I’ve been hypnotized, and there’s a trigger word in a late scene of the movie. (Or maybe I’m just mad because I love watching the Oscars, and I worry the ceremony this evening will not be in any way satisfying, and I know everyone will complain about it, and I don’t understand why they’re cutting so many awards in key categories!) (That has nothing to do with my reaction to this movie, but I’m quite upset about that, too.)
Added at 5:08 pm, March 27th
It does occur to me that Julie herself wants to be a photographer, not a writer, but I still find it a strange move to tell someone else’s story with such a dishonest autobiographical conceit. I would love to see the story of Julie’s life, but that’s not really what we’re getting here. (I feel parts of this only seem so honest because of the talents of the actress.) The Worst Person in the World is perhaps a journey of empathy and personal growth on the part of a writer trying to understand another perspective. I like the film overall. Some scenes are absolutely brilliant, and the film undoubtedly succeeds in evoking emotion, but this very basic thing bothers me. There’s an underlying implication of, “Well, you’re just going to keep throwing your story in the trash, anyway, so I’m going to tell it for you. I know it better than you do, anyway. I’ve known a million of you.” This feeling bothers me because this is a good film. It’s certainly a better film than I could make because it often conveys relatable experiences, familiar emotions, odd feelings, nonverbally. (If it is a Norwegian Annie Hall, though, I find Annie Hall the superior film. (I don’t know why I let this random phrase influence me. This is why I try never to read anything first. I feel like telling the story of a man by pretending to tell the story of a woman is more of a 1977 thing to do, and Annie Hall is funnier. This film does touch on issues that are more relevant today. It did speak to me at many moments. But I feel like it tricked me by feigning an authenticity it did not possess.) Clearly it’s a great film, though, because I’m still thinking about it the next day.)
Overall:
I did like The Worst Person in the World, but dear God it made me angry! I really don’t understand that visceral response. (I would assume I’m just crazy, except that my daughter and my husband also found the movie quite enraging at the end.) It’s a good film, though. Renate Reinsve gives a great performance.