The Oscar-nominated melodrama justifies Millennial egotism.
Our era’s fascination with “influencers,” “thought leaders,” disrupters, and icons is explained by The Worst Person in the World. The film’s current Oscar-related showing was preceded by an endorsement from Team Obama, who somehow beat Team Hillary at promoting this justification of contemporary self-interest.
On looks alone, the film’s lead actress, Renata Reinsve, is media-ordinary. She could be a composite of the female newsreaders favored by CBS or the average college grad whose passive-aggressive activism is summed up by the term “Karen.” Reinsve’s auburn hair, Caucasian paleness, and thin features make the character Julie a cultural identification point, especially for director Joachim Trier — this is yet another of his movies in which a modern young Norwegian woman takes advantage of her sexual autonomy.
An emblem of the West, Julie is idealized in her exercise of privilege — a medical student who impetuously shifts career interest to photography, changing occupations and preoccupations according to her undeveloped personality. “I go from one thing to another. I never see anything through.” She’s a Millennial role model.
Trier structures Julie’s story into twelve segments — a cheeky nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s great 1962 female character study, My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie), which boasted “12 precise segments.” But the difference from Godard’s cultural analysis (movingly centered on the passionate Anna Karina) is telling: Trier presents Julie as a representative Millennial whereas Godard examined how a shopgirl succumbed to her society’s exploitation and, through her own “choice,” revealed its lowest estimation of behavior. Trier salutes those standards along with the bourgeois tenets of casual white European feminist privilege. Trier’s fluid style (gliding through Oslo, weaving in Julie’s fantasies that include a harrowing drug escapade) surpasses the dysfunctional eccentricity of the already forgotten Toni Erdmann. It’s the same tease as Samuel Levinson’s HBO series Euphoria but with an art-film’s English subtitles.
Enjoying The Worst Person in the World requires acceptance of what, in critic Cole Smithey’s description, is its “ethically challenged” heroine. Julie’s flighty love life moves between two men who alternately bring out her selfishness (blond cartoonist Aksel, played by Anders Danielsen Lie) and her deluded selflessness (dark-haired bookseller Eivind, played by Herbert Nordrum). While Julie’s nonchalance may be a matter of taste — and preference — the men’s turmoil is more emotive and affecting, largely because their ordinariness is so rarely seen that it’s captivating. Their goofy, flirtatious meet-cute scenes are the film’s high point. Smug Julie is no Everygirl like Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall; she’s a standard-bearer, running an emotional gamut without charm.
Trier is not new at sucking up to social trends and malgn influence. His 2016 Thelma, about a self-denying teenage lesbian, mixed sci-fi speculation with sadomasochism to reveal the source of a young girl’s power over her oppressors. Julie corrects that victimization. Her carefree duplicity very much suggests worst practices in a Beltway training film. She’s an archetype of what mainstream media suggests all #MeToo women should be. Because its title is absolute Gen Z sarcasm, Trier’s training film could also be titled “Despicable Me” without irony.
