THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Emancipation from self-doubt. 

Why judge a person on screen for the moments you can’t help see yourself in? What is the purpose, if not to step into a character’s shoes and live consequence-free their actions till the end credits?

Finally, you can judge to the fullest extent. Scrutinise till your heart’s content. She is The Worst Person in the World after all. No matter how much you can see that she’s not, you are free to judge. Free to have your own thoughts about her without the title swaying you any further, because you can see someone who is just like you. And just like you, she is searching.

Searching exactly like the other characters around her. Some of these characters though may appear to have stopped their search to accept their life as something that doesn’t need to be “figured out”. But there is almost always more.

You feel it sometimes when you go to bed. You feel it sometimes when you’re watching the sunrise, or the moment you decide to reserve your energy to be around people you struggle to get on with. You can waste many words to describe this feeling, but putting it into words will not make you feel strong. Sometimes you just need to see where that feeling takes you, and accept that you might just find that something which could make you stop searching.

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The Worst Person in the World is not a film with answers or solutions. It is a story of a woman who is struggling with an early hurdle in adult life, and arguably one of the most important: What do you want to be? The answer to this isn’t like a math equation, like some article you might read online or quiz you might take would suggest; there isn’t one answer for every set group of people. There are different routes you can take to help find it, however, but sometimes people open themselves up to multiple opportunities.

Take Julie’s (played by Renate Reinsve) talent for writing for example. Clearly, there is a skill there that might be worth pursuing as a career - based on the reactions from those who read her raunchy article may suggest. When Eivind (played by Herbert Nordrum) found a printed version of the article in the trash, he praises it, saying it is something about her, almost a clue into who she once was. Julie seemingly took offence at his comments, especially when he starts to say the same series of adjectives everyone else starts to give her in ‘support’ of her written work. She doesn’t pursue this path, though she is fortunately talented in other fields too. We are never told otherwise, unless we take seriously her own nihilistic judgements of herself (an unreliable source). It is this self doubt in fact that leads her down other paths.

This is one of the things I believe I connected with the most. It is a human film: delicate with life in its touch. Watching this the first time is like watching a life through thin glass. It’s freeing in many ways other films cannot be. Its characters and topic matters are not fodder for gossipers, but full of what you don’t really hear about. Stirred throughout with complex emotion and actual thought. She is stuck in her 20s and by a certain stage in the film, she is stuck in her 30s. Stuck is the most appropriate way I can describe it because the world and the people around her are still moving. From her and our own perspective (as film-goers), the passage of time can barely sway the trajectory of the adults she encounters in the early part of the film, but she seemingly can’t move anywhere -- this I believe is the crux of the conflict in the film -- until the opposite happens.

In one of the film’s most memorable moments (so memorable that the marketing team used the sequence as a basis for the film’s advertisement campaign), Julie flips a switch and everything freezes. She is free to explore and find what she wants without any consequence. That flip in her character too is like a switch. It’s powerful because she does things in that surreal moment that should be deemed unfaithful, though she is safe in the unjudging, motionless world around her. With no one alive and moving to compare her actions to, she finds an honest kind of freedom from us as spectators. Nothing matters in this moment except what she desires.

Firstly, on the experience of watching this sequence, its technical aspects are staggering. Secondly, the entire sequence is emotionally freeing. You may not have made your mind up with her by that point in the film, but you must be cold-hearted to not at least smile at her happiness. The world stopped for her. Unless you’re living your “perfect life”, I bet you crave to possess that ability too. And at some point in the film’s 128-minute runtime, it felt like Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In the World made the world stop for me too - just for a split second.

I could feel the neurons in my brain fire when I saw the opening shot. It fired similarly, but 5x [five times] as much when the closing shot appeared. I haven’t even mentioned the performance from Anders Danielsen Lie, who had me in his character’s weak but articulate grip in the majority of the scenes he is in. I started to relate and sympathise with Lie’s character further and further until I was looking into a reflection of a sad reality that only an outside perspective could possibly see. If a piece of cinema is about showing who we are to ourselves then this is the strongest example I have in recent memory that comes close to showing audiences worldly truths about who we are while keeping at bay a dramatic representation or a societal warning. Despite being littered with detailed and recognisable story beats, there is an essence holding this film together which would be difficult for any of other piece of work to replicate. A few days after watching The Worst Person In the World, I couldn’t help but feel content with what the film has provided me. I want no more from it than perhaps a second watch sometime soon.

Watched at the Watershed on 8th April 2022.