‘The Worst Person in the World’: Renate Reinsve’s Star-Making Performance Elevates Cannes Romcom [Review]

Review originally posted on 07.09.21 at the Cannes Film Festival

Following his last two mediocre efforts, director Joachim Trier tries to go back and complete the trilogy that started with his two strongest films (“Reprise” and “Oslo, August 31st”). 

Told in 12 Chapters, “The Worst Person in the World” is Trier’s return to millennial angst, but the fresh perspective which may have infused his earlier films has vanished here, time has caught up to such a story, at least in cinema, to the point where Noah Baumbach comparisons will inevitably be made. 

Thank the heavens then for Renate Reinsve who plays Julie, a med school student in her late 20s filled with all the youthful possibilities the world can offer, only to scrap her medicine plans for a botched career in photography. She then dumps her stunned doctor boyfriend in favor of 44-year-old underground cartoonist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie).

Trier and his co-writer Eskil Vogt want to tackle how a person needs to so badly treat the people around her to find her own sense of self, thus “The Worst Person in the World” title. Aksel wants to have children, his biological clock ticking, Julie soon realizes she needs to leave him. In the best chapter of the film, Julie walks home alone from a party and spontaneously crashes into another random shindig, there she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). They play a game — how intimate can they get without cheating? It’s incredibly sumptuous stuff and Trier shoots it with the delicacy needed for us to soon realize this is probably the guy she will leave Aksel for. 

This is accessible stuff from Trier, with a straightforward literary structure, which is why a bidding war between streamers is brewing for the rights of the film, or so I’m told. There are nice little montages concocted here and there, including one about Julie’s ancestry which shows how people live a lot longer than they used to, showcasing how, although time may be running out to build a career for herself, she would probably already be dead if this story were happening 200 years ago as the average mortality rate for a woman back then was a mere 35. 

And yet, as the movie goes along it can’t sustain any momentum, it continuously loses steam, morals come into the equation, Julie begins to find her way and the absorbingly energetic individual she once was is replaced by, gosh, responsible adulthood . However, it’s Reinsve, in her first major role, as the smart but naive Julie that saves this film from cuddlesome twee — you can’t take your eyes off her. [B-]