The Worst Person in the World * * * *

The Worst Person in the World running from herself.

With reviewers giving it 100% approval I was greatly looking forward to seeing this film. I will agree it's good, but heck, settle down!

Looking at his last two films (unreviewed here, sorry!) Joachim Trier seemed to be on a much more interesting track. His film before this, Thelma, bordered on the supernatural, and before that, Louder Than Bombs was also slightly unhinged from reality.

Aside from one fanciful stop-motion scene (which is beautifully done), The Worst Person in the World (great title), is much more realistic.  In some ways it is quite uneventful.  Julie is a young woman who has just turned thirty.  In voice-over she tells us that she really doesn't know where she is going in life.  Training to be a surgeon she found it unfulfilling so she switched to psychology, then to photography, then to simply working in a book store.

The other part of her life is about men - mainly her boyfriends.  Interestingly she doesn't seem to have a buddy type girlfriend to hang out with or talk to (I think that would help her).  Both of the boyfriends we meet seem pretty good guys.  A girl could do much worse for herself. 

Another man having a subliminable but inevitable influence in her life is her father. This he does by showing next to no interest in her.

Always feeling she is on the outside of everything, Julie will sit through conversations without input.  She witnesses other peoples families fighting and wonders if children are worth while or if she would be any good as a parent. At times she is suprisingly adventurous: She will gate crash a party, take drugs, flirt. She tries her hand at writing, and comes up with an essay on the right to enjoy sex as an ocassional submissive in the age of "Me too".

It's beautifully acted and directed. I mean, it will charm you! And pretty Julie will solicit your sympathy for most of the time, even though she is a girl with "problems" that could probably be solved if she stopped assuming that life should be perfect all the time.  Yet she is a fascinating psychological study herself.  Long after the film is finished you might be reflecting on aspects of her behaviour that you might not have first noticed (or maybe that's just me).

It's divided into twelve chapters,each one with a title, and each one a building block in this biography, though I'm really not sure why Triers has gone down this road. I can only assume he's been (understandably) excited by the work of Greta Gerwig.