NYFF 59 Review: We're All 'The Worst Person in the World'
“If you have feelings for me, love me, we’ll sort out all the other stuff.”
“Yes, I do love you … but I also don’t.”
Once you’re past your teenage years and college is behind you, the general consensus is that you’ll have everything figured out. Somehow, after all those developmental years, things will fall into place and life will get better from there on in (or at least that’s how it is in the movies). The reality is life’s hard, and it comes at you fast. So fast, that you barely have time to fully figure it out in the moment, and before you know, it you feel like you’re behind the curve on most everything. Being this age, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, and feeling like a failure has something oddly and painfully specific to it that Joachim Trier captures to a tee in The Worst Person in the World.
Fittingly told through the lens of a dark comedy, Trier channels the tumult of the late-twenty-something milieu through Julie (Renate Reinsve), a twenty-nine year old about to turn thirty who works at a bookstore and has a steady relationship with someone fifteen years her senior. Though unmarried, there is already external pressure to start a family and settle down, an idea she’s not fully on board with particularly because she doesn’t feel it’s in her best interest at this point in her life. Toss in the aspirational set back and the occasional domestic squabble and Julie starts having serious considerations about whether she’s where she’s supposed to be in life. All of this is made worse when she meets someone new and the decision must be made whether or not she should start again or stay steadfast with what she’s already got going on.
Julie’s problems are her own, yet not unfamiliar. Her actions generate sympathy not because they invoke drama, but rather because it feels as if we are watching some kind of eerie reflection of our own experience that we know to be true about life in our twenties. Seeing Julie struggle to formulate her own path forward — individually, interpersonally, or otherwise — frequently offers a cathartic relief for those going through it right now or those who have gone through it in the past.
One such matter that will perhaps relate the most to audiences is Julie’s love life. She has four onscreen relationships of varying significance over the course of the film, and a major source of conflict in the film is ending one and beginning another. Julie has relative stability in her current relationship, but is it worth staying if better living is just around the corner? During the ebbs and flows of these relationships, Trier underscores the feeling of being torn, capturing the ever so nuanced specificity of not knowing whether this is the right or wrong decision and the subsequent sentiment of feeling like piece of shit because of it.
The titular 'worst person in the world' is a reference to this kind of self-loathing, the kind that comes when your life is in such a tailspin that every decision you make might be a misstep, that a step forward might actually be a step back, and that whatever you do, you’re left with the inalienable feeling that you’re a bad person. The prologue shows Julie switching majors and boyfriends in quick succession — the everyday sampling of the early twenties — but on the doorstep of thirty, similar sampling’s no longer feel acceptable.
People are in stable long term relationships. Others are getting married. Some are having kids. And Julie is just stuck, left with the expectation that things should be so easy and clear cut for her but it’s not. All of it feels so overwhelming, especially when she doesn’t even know what she wants from herself, or what others want from her. Trier dynamically pushes and pulls this sentiment, giving Julie enough slack in her youthful dispositions to figure herself out and extending a sympathetic hand to audiences who similarly feel adrift.
Maybe the twenty-something watching this film will see themselves in Joachim Trier’s film and realize they, too, are the worst person in the world. We all might be. But being so may not be all that bad in the grand scheme of things. At least not forever. At least while we’re still trying to figure things out.
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