The Worst Person in the World (2021)

Tagline:
N/A

Wide Release Date:
July 8, 2021

Directed by:
Joachim Trier
Written by:
Eskil Vogt, Joachim Trier
Produced by:
Andrea Berentsen Ottmar, Thomas Robsahm

Starring:
Renate Reinsve
Anders Danielsen Lie
Herbert Nordrum

PREGAME THOUGHTS

The Normal People miniseries was one of the best romantic stories I’ve ever watched or read. Reddit gave me a plethora of movies I might like if I liked Normal People, and The Worst Person in the World was one of the ones that was actually available streaming somewhere. I like quirky romantic comedy/dramas with female leads! Let’s get to it.

THE 600(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Meet Julie (Renate Reinsve). She doesn’t know what the FUCK she wants to do with her life. Starting off as a medical student, she switches to psychology, then photography. She seems to stick with photography. She meets a man named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a subversive and edgy comic book artist whose disposition is actually pretty stoic and friendly. He’s roughly 15 years older than Julie. After a trip to Aksel’s parents’ house, where Julie meets all of Aksel’s married and kid-having friends (and Aksel broaches the subject of starting a family), Julie gets weird and anxious.

Julie and Aksel attend Aksel’s publishing launch party. Feeling antsy, Julie ducks out of the party and crashes a wedding reception where she meets a man named Eivind, who is also in a relationship. They spend the whole evening toeing the line of “cheating” by doing things like sucking in each other’s cigarette smoke and watching each other pee. The party goes on until morning, at which they break off into their separate ways after giving each other their first names.

This moment brought to you by R. Kelly.

Suddenly deciding to be a writer now, Julie writes a feminist story that Aksel is impressed with and encourages her to post it online. She then visits her (divorced) mother for her 30th birthday, an event where her father didn’t make an appearance. Julie learns later that her father was watching her teenage half-sister’s soccer tournament at the time. Aksel and Julie visit her father to confront him about why he never visits Julie in Oslo. He makes excuses. Aksel asks if he has read Julie’s story, but he claims that it’s hard to figure out how to work a mouse or something else equally asinine. Julie lets it go.

While working in a bookstore, Julie catches Eivind’s eye while he’s shopping around with his girlfriend. They have a brief exchange before he books it, so to speak! It’s at this point that Julie starts finding her relationship with Aksel lifeless and dull. We see a dream sequence where all of time freezes as Julie runs to the coffee shop that Eivind works at. They all hell of such as kiss. After waking up the next morning, Julie suddenly breaks up with the perplexed Aksel.

That’s a lot on the nose there, Aksel.

Eivind’s girlfriend has slowly become annoyingly obsessed with activism with respect to climate change, animal rights, and social justice. Eivind tried to get on board, but he becomes increasingly disengaged with the relationship as days pass. Needless to say, they break up and Julie and Eivind end up moving in together. An evening of hallucinations via magic mushrooms reveals to Julie that she is also somewhat dissatisfied with her relationship with Eivind and starts taking it out on him. He is perplexed. A lot of people are perplexed in this movie. Julie learns she is pregnant, which scares the piss out of her.

Aksel has cancer! Julie visits him in the hospital, where he talks about how much he loves her and how afraid he is to die. She tells Aksel that she’s pregnant and scared, but Aksel assures her that she will be a great mother. She ends up telling Eivind, but says she doesn’t know if she’ll keep it.

On another day, a friend tells Julie the Aksel might not live through the night. Julie has a miscarriage in the shower.

Later, possibly years later, Julie works as a photographer on set of a movie. Once filming is finished, the actress meets Eivind outside while he holds a baby. I’m guessing Julie is still floundering through her life and it’s not going to end anytime soon! Movie’s over.

We all feel that way after watching this! Ha!

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

I enjoyed this movie as entertainment, but as a follow-up to the Normal People miniseries I was left rather cold. I didn’t feel very many emotions as I watched Julie flail her way through life and relationships over the course of what I assume to be a few years. As someone who is still in the relationship he started when he was 17 years old, perhaps I don’t find it relatable enough (except for the occasional crisis where I believe that I missed out on literally everything in my life, haha, except for that).

I know it’s called “The Worst Person in the World” for tongue-in-cheek reasons. Julie is a human being, after all, and human beings are flawed, complex creatures. Just because you want to be happy in life doesn’t make you a bad person, even if your actions seem selfish or damaging. I guess. I’m still working that one out in my own therapy sessions, but I’m told that the sad party needs to work that shit out on their own time! For example, Julie breaks up with Aksel for no real reason other than she’s dissatisfied, and it’s up to Aksel to deal with that shit, man. That’s the harsh reality of life. Now, the whole seeing another guy thing is a little more reprehensible, but the movie doesn’t try to make Julie a sympathetic party. In fact, the movie treats her actions and behaviors with neutrality, for the most part. She certainly grows and matures by the end of the movie, but we as the audience don’t know where her story is going to lead to next. Such is life, baby.

Here’s a good one to keep in your back pocket when you’re caught looking at sinful pornography.

I mean, I guess I can sort of relate. I find a lot of dissatisfaction with my life through no one’s fault but my own, but I don’t have the freedom to hit the pause button for a few months to try something new and see if it works out. I guess no one does, but I especially don’t! Trust me on that one, I’m the kind of unique snowflake that all the conservatives hate so much. I think a little bit of the problem was that I didn’t connect with or care about any of the characters. Julie is flakey, and that was immediately presented to us with her constant career path changes. Aksel is arrogant as shit and I didn’t care whatsoever when he got cancer. He was also ugly. Sorry. Eivind was ugly too, but at least he seemed like a nicer guy except for the whole cheating thing. The movie tried to excuse it by showing his inability to engage in his wife’s (girlfriend’s) sudden ultra lifestyle shift with respect to climate change activism and veganism I think, I don’t remember. And those were the only three main characters. I didn’t really like any of them.

Anyway, the movie treats life as life and doesn’t romanticize most of it. The overly-romanticized part was the “not cheating” montage with Eivind, which was an interesting idea in its own right, but the whole thing made me nervous, I guess. In my opinion, they were clearly cheating. Watching someone pee is cheating. Come on, now.

TOPIC 2 — Anxiety

I guess anxiety defines my (millennial) generation, huh? I saw a tweet once that was something like “Millennials are anxious because they saw 3000 people die on national TV and things never got better”. That in particular doesn’t apply to Norway, obviously, but globalization via internet has certainly shown everyone how incompetent literally the whole world is in real time. That accounts for a lot of it, I’m sure.

Right?? Fucking PC police everywhere!!

I didn’t get to have a late-20s crisis because I was too busy having a job and starting a family (all of which would ironically contribute to my current mid-30s crisis), so a lot of that aspect of Julie’s journey is lost on me. However, feeling unsatisfied and struggling to find what can satisfy me is my problem and that’s why I’m blogging. Doing a great job of it, too, huh?! Don’t answer that.

I think Julie’s anxiety is perfectly encapsulated during the mushroom-trippin’ scene. She imagines herself, among other things, aging into a grotesque floppy-breasted woman while having to take care of a baby. She visited all of Aksel’s life-successful friends and family and felt out of place and uncomfortable with it. She had to run away during Aksel’s launch party because she couldn’t handle it anymore. She imagines (or at least, the movie presents the metaphor of) time freezing, and she is able to escape her life to indulge in a quick detour by kissing Eivind. Mostly I just imagine stopping time in order to finish books, but maybe I lost my sense of priorities a long-ass time ago.

I still have anxiety and it’ll never go away! But at least The Worst Person in the World didn’t add to it, unless it did and I’ll feel it years later when I’m popping my 9th pill of the day to keep myself from having a panic attack about cleaning my fridge. Life is grand.

My life in a nutshell.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Prior to the movie, Renate Reinsve was ready to give up on acting to pursue a career in carpentry.
Just think. Renate Reinsve could’ve been hammering nails all day and instead she got to throw a used tampon at an old man and flash her really nice breasts a few times. Sometimes there are just pivotal life-changing forks in the road, you know.

Anders Danielsen Lie told director Joachim Trier before filming started, “I want to do the best acting I’ve ever done.”
Oh, NOW you want to act, huh? I’m sure Trier was really appreciative, you skinny piece of shit.

According to Joachim Trier, the film has been referred to as “the rom-com for people who hate rom-coms.”
I can get behind this. Remember Serendipity? Blech.

One of former President Barack Obama’s 14 Favorite Films of the Year 2021.
Which means it was one of Malia’s favorite films of 2021 and Barack just wanted to be hip with the times, yo.