Film review

  • The Worst Person in the World

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Verdens verste menneske

    Joachim Trier (2021)

    The heroine, Julie (Renate Reinsve), chooses medical school because it’s hard to get into – she wants her excellent exam grades to count for something.  She finds that surgery is ‘like carpentry’, decides she’s more interested in matters mental and spiritual, and switches to psychology.  She sleeps with her psychology professor but gives him and the course up to become a photographer.  To support herself, she gets a job in an Oslo bookshop, where her employment lasts longer than her higher education:  not long into The Worst Person in the World Julie has her thirtieth birthday.  By now, she’s in a relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a famous graphic novelist and cartoonist, fifteen years older than her.  He’s keen to have children but Julie says she’s not ready for motherhood.  She wants to get her life in order first.  Despite the passing years, she’s young enough to feel time will stand still for as long as she needs.

    That is what Joachim Trier makes happen in The Worst Person in the World’s most noticeable sequence.  On the point of breaking up with Aksel, Julie leaves his apartment one morning, as he starts making coffee, and runs through the city streets.  She’s the only person in Oslo on the move:  everyone else is frozen in position, until she reaches her destination.  Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), whom Julie first met when she crashed a wedding reception where he was a guest, is also making coffee but, then, he’s a barista.  After leaving his workplace, he and Julie spend the rest of the day and the night together.  They part early the following morning, when Julie returns to Aksel’s apartment and he emerges from suspended animation.  He hands Julie a mug of coffee.  She gives him the bad news, though without admitting that she’s seeing someone else.

    In an earlier scene, Julie celebrates her thirtieth birthday in the company of Aksel, her mother (who’s estranged from Julie’s father) and her grandmother.  The camera, moving away from the table they’re sitting at, scans family portraits displayed on a dresser and the wall behind it.  A voiceover (on which more below) summarises the situation of several generations of Julie’s female ancestors at the age of thirty.  Her grandmother had appeared as Rebecca West in Rosmersholm at Norway’s National Theatre before becoming a mother of three.  Julie’s great-grandmother had lost two of her children to tuberculosis.  Her great-great-great grandmother was already in her grave, as most eighteenth-century Norwegian women were by their mid-thirties.  This is an obvious but effective way of underlining how much more time and choice is available to Julie as an educated, middle-class, western European young woman of today but Trier, like Jacques Audiard in Paris, 13th District, means to illustrate the ups and downs of millennial freedom.  I loathed Paris, 13th District (and, for that matter, Louder Than Bombs (2015), the only other Trier movie I’d seen before this one).  There’s no denying that Julie and the film she’s in have their vexing features.  So why did I enjoy The Worst Person in the World?

    First and foremost, because of Renate Reinsve, who has amazing emotional fluidity and the (related?) ability to look sometimes unremarkably pretty and sometimes extraordinarily beautiful:  Julie’s changes in mood are, for better or worse, often signalled by a rosy blush suffusing her flawless complexion.  Reinsve, who’s in nearly every scene, won Best Actress at last year’s Cannes for this performance and it’s hard to believe the prize was undeserved.   I also like the film because Trier and Eskil Vogt (his regular writing partner, who again shares the screenplay credit) do a good job of situating Julie in a present-day context without suggesting that her troubled irresolution is a novelty.  At a drinks do to launch Aksel’s latest comic book, Julie has to get out, makes her excuses and leaves the gathering.  It’s a lovely, sunny evening; after walking a little way, she pauses to look at Oslo spread out below her and her eyes fill with tears.  She knows she’s attractive, clever and privileged yet she feels dissatisfied, and doesn’t understand why.  At the book launch, she may have been oppressed by a sense of being merely Aksel’s companion – perhaps also by not knowing what more she wants to be.  In this expressive moment, Julie, as Trier implies in the production notes used by BFI as their handout for screenings of the film, could be a character created by Ingmar Bergman – even Henry James.

    The Worst Person in the World is supposedly the last part of Joachim Trier’s ‘Oslo Trilogy’, following Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011).  Trier is Danish, as are Kasper Tuxen and Olivier Bugge Coutté, his cinematographer and editor respectively.  In the production notes, Trier also remarks on the ‘very special’ light in Oslo, and Tuxen and Bugge Coutté’s astonishment at the difference between Norwegian and Danish light, despite the two countries’ proximity.  Trier clearly  has a strong attachment to the city his trilogy’s named for.  In this film anyway, he likes all three of his main characters, too.

    When Julie meets Eivind at the wedding, they get fairly drunk, agree not to be unfaithful to their other halves but spend the night testing the boundary between intimacy and infidelity, which includes describing sexual preferences, smelling sweat and watching each other pee.  (Whatever turns you on probably is the appropriate phrase here …)  When they say goodbye next morning, they don’t intend to meet again – they do so when Eivind and his partner, Sunniva (Maria Grazia Di Meo), turn up one day in the bookshop where Julie works.  The suit and tie Eivind wears for the wedding anonymise him, and enable Trier and Herbert Nordrum to reveal who he is gradually and surprisingly.  You expect his work to be more white collar than it turns out to be; Julie, when she tires of him, berates and hurts Eivind by accusing him of being willing to work behind a coffee-shop counter until he’s fifty.  Eager and confident when they’re having sex, he’s increasingly diffident and vulnerable out of bed.

    Anders Danielsen Lie had a lead role in the two preceding Oslo trilogy films and briefly takes centre stage in the later stages of this one, when Julie learns that Aksel has pancreatic cancer and goes to see him.  Aksel is a contemporary of Trier and Eskil Vogt, who may be putting themselves in his terminal illness shoes when he tells Julie how much time he now spends re-watching favourite films, how rooted he is in an object-based culture that’s now also in decline (objects ‘were interesting because we could live among them’).  Aksel’s creative output is little consolation in the face of impending extinction:  he quotes Woody Allen (without attribution) when he tells Julie, ‘I don’t want to live on through my art; I want to live on in my apartment’.  Lie’s acting here is a huge advance on what I’d seen from him before (chiefly in Paul Greengrass’s 22 July (2018) and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island (2021)).  He develops the various strands of Aksel’s vulnerability subtly and, in the end, powerfully.

    Trier and Vogt have written plenty of high-quality dialogue, and given the characters individual voices.  An early episode in which Aksel and Julie spend a weekend with two other couples, with children, dramatises tensions in the air and that emerge in conversation, recognising the difference between the two things:  plenty remains unsaid.  The Worst Person in the World has major weaknesses, though, and the excellence of the main performances has the effect of drawing attention to them.  At the start, Trier stresses Julie’s intelligence and desire to make use of it.  Renate Reinsve’s alert, fine-tuned presence means you never lose sight of that but Trier first blurs Julie’s creative vs romantic indecision then suggests these two parts of her life are simply separable.  He opts to focus on her love life, in ways that start to feel lazy.  He makes clear what draws her to medical and psychology degrees but not the appeal to her of photography or when she actually picks up a camera.  She tries her hand at writing and produces a piece about feminism and oral sex.  She chucks it out but Aksel retrieves it from a waste bin.  (That’s the default soap-opera location for secret writing that’s bound to be discovered but Trier’s modern twist is nice:  Aksel says he took the crumpled sheets out of the bin to move to paper recycling.)  He thinks the piece is well written and he encourages Julie to post it online, which she does.  The voiceover returns to note that the blog post provoked debate but we’ve no idea what that meant to Julie or whether she blogged again (and, if not, why not) or what kind of writer she means to be.  These are serious omissions when a main cause of her growing frustration with her life with Aksel is his absorption in an established creative career.

    Like the Paris, 13th District set, Julie appears to have virtually no cultural or political interests – a problem in the environment, and in view of the dilemmas, that Trier creates for her.  Her blog post is entitled ‘Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo’ but she doesn’t have much to say on Bobcat, the scatological and sexist feline protagonist of Aksel’s comic books; after they’ve split up, she happens to see Aksel being trounced by an anti-Bobcat feminist critic in a television discussion but it’s unclear what Julie thinks about this.  When she derides Eivind’s lack of intelligence and ambition, it comes out of nowhere.  When she and Aksel eventually meet up again, she tells him she’s never talked with anyone else as she used to talk with him – implying that their conversation was uniquely stimulating, intellectually and emotionally.  This makes no sense since the main verbal exchange between them up to now has been the one that immediately precedes her leaving him.  When the dying Aksel, reminiscing about his movie favourites, asks, ‘How many times can you watch Dog Day Afternoon?’ and Julie replies, ‘A lot’, it comes as a surprise:  the only film she’s mentioned hitherto is Bambi.  Her photography stays on the back burner until it’s useful to Trier.  Julie takes pictures of Aksel in his last days; in the (weak) epilogue, she’s working on a film set as a stills photographer.  Like the #MeToo piece that isn’t followed up, this seems to say more about the writer-director’s casual approach than about Julie.

    Trier’s use of the aforementioned voiceover (Ine Jansen) is inconsistent and, as a result, unsatisfying.  At the start, it has almost too much to say – you want it to stop to let you concentrate on the people on the screen.  As the film goes on, the voice features only sporadically and not at all in the closing stages.  When, as happens a couple of times, it’s heard during characters’ conversations, it seems to represent what’s uppermost in their minds regardless of what they’re saying.  Usually, though, Trier resorts to voiceover as the simplest way of conveying information and giving it a definitive ring.  Text at the start announces that the film will comprise twelve chapters, plus prologue and epilogue.  Each chapter has a name (‘Cheating’, ‘Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo’, and so on).  Since Trier’s storytelling is clear enough not to need this structuring, it seems to be no more than a homage to/pinch from a famous cinema portrait of a young urban woman of sixty years ago – Godard’s Vivre sa vie:  film en douze tableaux (1962).  Some chapters are self-contained and have little or no discernible influence on what happens next.  ‘Finnmark Highlands’ is a quick précis of Eivind’s life with Sunniva:  after discovering her Sami ancestry, she becomes a passionate climate change and indigenous peoples’ rights activist and a bit much for Eivind:  the episode comes across as cheap-shot ridiculing of Sunniva’s brand of advocacy.   ‘Julie’s Narcissistic Circle’ describes what happens when a couple of Eivind’s friends join him and Julie in their apartment, and discover his stash of magic mushrooms, of which all four partake.  The only point of the horrifying psychedelic consequences seems to be to confirm Julie’s animosity towards her father, which Trier seemed to have forgotten about.

    ‘I feel like a spectator in my own life – like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life’.  This is Julie explaining her feelings to Aksel as she prepares to walk out on him.  Her words – never mind the ‘supporting role’ – are self-dramatising, and you might expect the film’s title to be another self-description.  In fact, it’s Eivind who feels ‘like the world’s worst person’ when he’s cheating on Sunniva and leaving her for Julie – but the heroine doesn’t have a high opinion of herself.  When Aksel eventually tells her she’s ‘a damned good person’, she finds the judgment hard to accept.  The insights of The Worst Person in the World – on love, time, delusion and evasion – aren’t remarkable but the principals’ charms and frailties are distinctive and make you root for them, especially Julie.  Joachim Trier’s attention to important parts of his story is highly erratic but his sympathy for the main characters is sustained.  Aksel, Eivind and, again, especially, Julie are more than continuously entertaining company.  These are screen lives that seem to matter.

    6 April 2022

  • True Things

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Harry Wootliff (2021)

    Harry Wootliff’s second feature is the story of a woman’s obsessive attachment to a clearly unreliable man – or, rather, a man who reliably mistreats her.  Kate (Ruth Wilson), in her thirties and single, lives in Ramsgate and works in a benefits claims centre.  She prefers her phone screen, scrolling through images of sunny holiday destinations, to her office PC.  Her manager (Michael Moreland) warns Kate about poor time-keeping and absenteeism.  (Is it really the case that you need a medical certificate for a one-day migraine?)  As he talks, her attention wanders to two flies crawling up the wall.  She perks up a bit when a new claimant, probably about the same age as her, arrives at her desk – a peroxide blonde-haired man (Tom Burke), who has just been released from prison.  After running through claim registration formalities, she asks if he has any further questions.  ‘What are you doing for lunch?’ he replies.  By the end of the working day, they’re having a stand-up quickie in a multi-storey car park.  Blond (as he’s known throughout the film) aggressively calls the shots during this encounter but it’s Kate on whom it makes a lasting impression.  While they’re having sex, her head smacks into the wall behind her (‘You all right there, darlin’?’).  It’s not long into True Things before you’re wondering if that collision with concrete has resulted in brain damage.  Why does Kate pursue a hopeless relationship with this man?

    It says a lot for the direction and for Ruth Wilson’s performance that, not too much further into the narrative, you accept Kate’s unhappy devotion to Blond – even though he repeatedly goes incommunicado and, when he re-emerges, is mostly antagonistic and insulting about Kate’s attitudes, dress sense, and more.   You accept this not simply because you know there’s no film without it.   The screenplay, by Wootliff and Molly Davies (adapted from Deborah Kay Davies’s 2010 novel True Things About Me), doesn’t give the isolated protagonist much context – she seems to be an only child with just one friend, Alison (Hayley Squires), who’s also a work colleague – but it’s enough to show that, as well as being turned on by Blond and enjoying sex with him, he represents a kind of grim corrective to a life that’s stifling Kate.  In the latter part of the story, Wilson occasionally suggests the character’s own incomprehension of why she wants more of Blond and her driven curiosity to find out what will happen next, though it’s bound to be unpleasant.  The viewer shares this combination of feelings.  Ashley Connor’s cinematography also helps realise the obsession: the camera is often so close up on Ruth Wilson that it’s virtually sharing Kate’s point of view.

    Like Wootliff’s first film, Only You (2018), True Things is limited but absorbing, and Kate’s monomania serves to validate the one-track story.  The main characters aren’t likeable as they were in Only You but Wootliff delivers some deft mood shifts.  On one of Kate’s rare enjoyable outings with Blond, when they go swimming and sunbathing together, he makes fun of the ‘posh’ way she talks – ‘I bet you call your parents mummy and daddy’.  Kate, amused, replies that her parents’ names are Susan and Trevor, and asks what Blond calls his.  The answer to that is ‘bitch and cunt’:  he says he never knew his father and that his mother put him in care when he was a young child.  When we first meet Kate’s (un-posh) mother and father (Elizabeth Rider and Frank McCusker) the details of lower-middle-class conventionality feel a bit overdone – until Wootliff starts to ring the changes.  Susan’s tone, as she announces that Kate’s married cousin has just had another baby, is chiding and wistful; both parents want to know more about their daughter’s new (unnamed) young man.  Kate explains that he’s been having a tough time but is now getting back on his feet even though ‘he has no legs’.  Her mother is suitably appalled; her father laughs when Kate reveals she’s joking.  He tells Kate she must take some of his home-grown tomatoes, which she insists she doesn’t want.  Wootliff then cuts to her driving back from her parents’ home with tears in her eyes and tomatoes on the passenger seat.

    There are moments where Kate’s awareness of the potential effects of what she’s doing make her think twice.  Although phone texts are by now a standard part of film vocabulary, Wootliff makes clever use of them.   Kate composes an enthusiastic message to Blond that ends in four exclamation marks; on reflection, she removes three of them.  On the point of sending him a less jolly text, complaining about what he’s done, she pauses then deletes it.  Kate seems to feel a duty to do what’s expected of her.  After a showdown with her mother, she makes amends by accompanying Susan, numbly and glumly, on a tour round a show house.  At other times when she tries to do the conventional thing, Kate does it wrong.  During one of Blond’s absences, she goes on a blind date, arranged by Alison, with Rob (Tom Weston-Jones) – he’s good-looking, pleasantly sociable, and he bores Kate silly.  She drinks too much in the bar where they meet; when Rob gives her a lift home, she starts removing her dress and asking him for sex.  He’s appalled (‘This is a work car!’) and hurriedly drops her off near her flat.  Waiting outside to reclaim Kate is Blond, who takes her to a party, during which he vanishes again.

    As in The Souvenir (2019), Tom Burke plays a capricious, controlling figure who takes over the heroine’s life, this time with a dodgy instead of an RP accent.  Burke gives another strong performance but having less to say makes it harder for him to build a character – as Wootliff surely intends:  she presents Blond primarily in terms of what he is to Kate.  We don’t know whether the little he reveals about his past is true, and Kate is rarely inclined to find out more.  Blond claims to have spent his formative years in a series of homes; he also claims to have a sister and an invitation, including a plus one, to her wedding in Spain.  Kate never asks about the sibling relationship when they were growing up.  At one point, in desperation, she turns up outside the address Blond gave at the benefits centre.  She doesn’t see much or hang around for long, though, and there’s no follow-up to this visit.

    Kate’s phone-screen sun-seeking eventually becomes an acrid then a liberating reality.  She goes to Spain as Blond’s wedding companion but travels from England alone.  He’s not there to meet her at the airport; by the time he turns up, she’s angry enough to be short with him.  As they get ready to go to a party that evening, he vetoes the shoes she was planning to wear.  At the party, she’s left on her own as Blond chats up other women and joins in swimming-pool horseplay.  Kate wanders out into the town, then into a club.  (The flashing lights forced me to look away so I’m guessing that, like Kate’s preceding stroll in the town, her visit to the club simply delivers an enlightening taste of independence.)  She returns to the hotel room, where Blond is asleep in bed, and writes him a message.  This time there are no second thoughts or edits.  The camera shows us the message though it doesn’t need to.  We know Kate will use exactly the same words Blond scribbled down on one of the occasions he left her in the lurch:  ‘Had to run.  See you’.  The next morning Kate is driving unaccompanied through a sunny landscape.  For the first time in True Things – in its closing shot – she looks relaxed.

    Most of us will be relieved that Kate finally gets Blond out of her system – but just like that?  The Damascene conversion undermines the film’s premise.  Even so, Harry Wootliff has made another consistently absorbing drama.  The sex scenes are exemplary:  they’re discreetly done but strongly convey how much the sex means to Kate (and how little to Blond).  Through Ashley Connor’s lens, Ramsgate, in the town and on the seafront, is emotionally expressive to a surprising degree.  Ruth Wilson gets good support from the reliable Hayley Squires as Alison, well-intentioned but always keen to be in charge of Kate, and Tom Weston-Jones, who helps make the blind date episode a grimly amusing highlight of True Things.  The music, effectively used, is by Alex Baranowski and, during the closing credits, Claude Debussy.

    2 April 2022

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