Movie Review: The Worst Person in The World

Debasish Goswami, GU

Cast- Renate Reinsve (Julie),

Andres Danielsen Lie (Aksel),

Herbert Nordrum (Eivind).

Director- Joachim Trier

Year- 2021

Language- Norwegian

OTT Platform- Amazon Prime

In every form of art around the globe, symbols flood entire departments of it; human evolution has been surrounded with these symbols. It is frequently thought to be a literary technique but its certainty is also prevalent in cinema. Symbolism works in many different ways in the midst of a film. These symbols in cinema can be used to portray various ideas, various emotions that are not superficial but holds a whole web of meaning amidst it. Various symbols like an object, colour coding, a character, the plot, sound, the camera angle, a transition and lot more. The interpretation of ideas behind these symbols are quite individualistic. There cannot be a single right answer to these interpretations as these symbols are hidden in ambiguity. The Symbolisms of film thus be searched through an analytical point of view and not from the casualization of watching a movie for fun (at least for someone doing film studies) which actually cloaks our thinking process and make us take these symbols for granted.

“All striving comes from lack, from a dissatisfaction with one's condition, and is thus suffering as long as it is not satisfied; but no satisfaction is lasting; instead, it is onlythe beginning of a new striving.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

The Film that I have selected for this analytical review is called “The Worst Person in The World”, directed by Joachim Trier. The language of the movie is Norwegian and it is one of the best international movies released in the year of 2021 and the genre is Romantic/Black Comedy/Drama. Everything in this film is unusual to the conventional ideas of human life portrayed in cinema yet reconnects us to the reality of the life we endure and not romanticize the ideal fantasy, yet that part too being very engrossed in the human mind. There is romance, sex, gentle humour, self-doubt, the burdens of adulthood and differing expectations from men and women – all delivered with deceptive ease and not a trace of heavy-handedness. Lead performer Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress award. Reinsve marvellously plays Julie, a 30-year-old Oslo resident who is unable to commit to career, human or, for that matter, any one idea. This movie actually revolves around the life of the central character named Julie, who is in crossroads of what are her actual needs and want in life. The life of Julie actually formulates with an unsatiable and unquenchable search for meaning. This movie and the characters in it, their relationships with each other symbolises a millennial unrest. At first, Joachim Trier’s elegant, fine-grained character study “The Worst Person in the World” threatens to be a similarly lofty essay on the millennial condition, beginning as it does with an omniscient voiceover that talks us through various ill-fated or ill- considered impulses from Julie’s twenties with a hint of arch, amused contempt. She begins studying medicine, before deciding that psychology is her passion, sticking with that a short time before reinventing herself as a photographer; her romantic relationships, it seems, are similarly determined by whims and phases. You can practically hear the tutting conservative boomer op-eds in the background, venting against the children they raised with too few boundaries, the generation that just won’t stick at anything. The film is divided into 12 chapters and it takes us through the journey, a journey of a reimagined reality, often hidden behind the ideal world of a person’s life, of their fantasized relationships, as these relationships are not what the cultural industry propagates. Symbolisms that I can connect are instances when she (Julie) was not sure what she wanted and then wanted to change the course of her life, we can actually see in one of the shots she dying her hair which kind of give the rhetoric of her changing her life and untethering her life from her previous part or job or relationship of her life. The movie’s arrangement into twelve chapters with a prologue and an epilogue gives it a structure that does not exist in real life. Neither does a narrator who expresses our innermost truths. These elements serve as reminders that we are watching a work of fiction, even so, we are nonetheless pulled in by the raw humanity of the characters’ stories. Like a poem, The Worst Person in the World may have a structure and voice that are counterfeit, a product of human imagination, but the emotions it exposes us to are anything but. While Julie’s particular actions may not by themselves resonate with viewers, the sentiments that evoke them surely do. Even if one does not relate to or condone Julie’s decision to leave her stable relationship for another lover she barely knows, her emotions, the restlessness and the discontentment that give rise to her actions address something that is common to all of us: the ceaseless ambition to discover what gives our lives meaning in the present. Scene of her breaking with her boyfriend and rushing to a stranger she liked, that entire scene being very different as her and this stranger can only move and everyone else is froze, symbolising how that change has brought her out of the monotonous life that also had her in her former relationship. In that same scene, she does lively things to the people around, helping a guy to impress the girl he’s dating which symbolizes the absence of things she had in her own existence and her love life and what she really wanted out of her own love life. The Worst Person in The World is not about the worst person in the world. If anything, it is about the tendency to be the harshest with oneself when making mistakes. It illustrates how human it is to tend towards dissatisfaction and thus be prompted to search for a sense of meaning that’ll combat it, no matter how slippery it can be, slithering out of our hands as soon as we think we’ve grasped it. It is a film that epitomizes the contemporary zeitgeist, the spirit of millennial anxiety and ambition. It’s 2 hours of an artistic embodiment of the essence of people’s fluctuating hopes, desires, doubts, and fears. In short, what it's like to be alive.