Or Verdens verste menneske
- YEAR: 2021
- DIRECTOR: Joachim Trier
- KEY ACTORS: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum
- CERTIFICATE: 15
- IMDB SCORE: 7.9
- ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 96%
SEX SCORE: 4/5
✔️ I’ve only seen this once but I can’t wait to see it again, so I’m going to say that it is rewatchable!
✔️ And it did pass the Bechdel test, but only just… This isn’t an ensemble cast movie though and is specifically about one woman’s relationship with the men in her life so it’s not surprising that there is only one conversation between women.
❌ I didn’t really want to fuck the cast, but this is my preference rather than a problem with them. They are objectively hot and fuckable, but just not for me!
✔️ It did inspire fantasies – of having that kind of perfect first meeting when everything feels new and exciting and the potential is intoxicating!
✔️ And it is sex positive. And feminist and, well, excellent!
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on…
STREAMING: Um, nowhere yet! Released in cinemas in the UK on March 25th and no doubt streaming shortly after! For a full list of streaming options when available, check out JustWatch.com
[Content warning: miscarriage, death, brief mentions of abusive relationships]
This is a new one for this blog – I’m writing about a movie that isn’t released in the cinema for another week! I was lucky enough to attend a preview screening this week and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and I wanted to write about it before I forgot how it made me feel.
I also wanted to write about it now because, while I was walking home from the cinema, I read a few reviews of The Worst Person in the World and was really sad to find that all the reviews for major publications were written by men. The Guardian, the Telegraph, the New Yorker, Roger Ebert’s site, Variety, the New York Times…in basically every place that I would immediately Google when looking for a review, I found one written by men and it punctured the feminist joy that The Worst Person in the World had inspired. Don’t misunderstand me – these reviews were mostly very good and showed me sides to the movie that I might otherwise have missed, but they weren’t what I was looking for. They weren’t giving me the perspective I wanted to share.
Where are the female critics? Why aren’t these big publications sending any women to write about a movie that is literally about a woman’s perspective on her relationships? The Worst Person in the World is about Julie’s decisions and indecisions, her choices and mistakes, her focus and indifference. It’s about her and her place in society and it’s feminist and extraordinary, and I wish I could have read some reviews by women like Wendy Ide for Screen Daily or Stephanie Zacharek for Time without having to specifically look for them.
Because I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie that better represents the feminist millennial/Gen Z experience. Or more, I’ve rarely felt as seen by a movie than I was by this one, which I don’t really understand as it doesn’t match my actual life experience at all, but I could feel it. I’m in an incredibly privileged position of being middle class, cis, straight and white so I don’t really suffer from a lack of representation on screen, but this was something else. This felt like it could have been about me if I had made only a few different life choices, and I don’t know that the male reviewers would have felt the same.
The Worst Person in the World tells the story of Julie, a 20-something girl living in Oslo. It’s told in 12 chapters (with prologue and epilogue) and each represents a different event in her life – chaotic career choices and lovers in her early 20s; meeting and falling for an older man, Askel, and key events in that affair; the chance meeting with a stranger, Eivind, with whom she shares secrets and intimacies but doesn’t actually cheat; the destruction of one relationship and the beginning of another. I mean, much more happens than that and I’ll talk about some of it here, but explaining the details would diminish it and really you should just see the movie.
I think I loved it so much because The Worst Person in the World was so obviously and deliberately taken from the female perspective, and I’ve rarely seen a movie so effortlessly show the difficulties that women and people who experience misogyny face when trying to exist in our current reality. I’m going through a real ‘ignorance is bliss’ moment where my growing feminism is ruining everything and I can’t ignore the casual sexism in old TV shows and movies. I find myself spending too long trying to decide if it’s purposeful representation or if they just didn’t notice, and it’s frustrating. Take the first series of Borgen, which I’m rewatching at the moment – the storyline about the female PM’s family breakdown and her husband’s crisis at his wife’s power and his relative domesticity is driving me mad! Are they trying to expose toxic masculinity and the patronising patriarchal tendencies of politics, or is it just because she’s a woman and women need family-based storylines?!
But I didn’t feel that question with The Worst Person in the World. I believed that it was on my side. Yes, there was a cliched I’m-writing-from-a-female-perspective-standard ‘if men had periods, we wouldn’t hear anything else’ discussion but it will be a long time before I am not grateful for periods to be mentioned in a mainstream movie. And Trier does so much more than this. He uses Askel, Julie’s partner, as the mouthpiece for misogyny and lets Julie react to him in a way that is so familiar and impossible to misunderstand. Julie comments on the misogyny in his comics and Askel dismisses her, telling her she’s wrong. Trier lets Askel drone on about his career, not asking about her and not noticing that Julie isn’t listening. He shows her dancing with Askel’s friend, upsetting that friend’s wife, and reflexively taking the blame. And, when she breaks up with him, Trier lets Askel tell her that she’s wrong. Lets him dictate and describe her feelings, telling her what she needs and that she’ll change her mind. Small touches that position Askel as the one in control, whether unconsciously or not, until, brilliantly, after they fuck one last time, Julie takes back the power and leaves while he is still naked – a full frontal scene that was purposefully added, according to Trier, to give women ‘some eye candy too’ but manages to underline Askel’s vulnerability.
Because, despite everything that I’ve said, I never got the impression that Askel was a bad person. He just didn’t understand and didn’t recognise how much the world has changed around him. The actor, Danielsen Lie, described him by saying that ‘there’s an old-fashioned masculinity to [Askel]. He feels that he belonged to a time that has passed and he is alienated by the fragmentation of culture in the digital world.’ His story arc is incredibly affecting, positioning him again as an avatar for the old patriarchal world but one that still inspires sympathy as he knows he’s wrong, knows that the world has no place for him, but can’t change. After dismissing Julie’s criticism earlier in the movie, Askel ends up publicly called out for the misogyny in his comics and responds by doubling down and making everything so much worse, a common and misplaced tactic when called out, but he later makes an extraordinary speech about how he doesn’t have the time left to do anything but look back, and I felt sorry for him. He’s never repentant, never acknowledges his flaws, but he seems so lost. Just like when he was naked earlier in the movie, we can see through him and see his confusion at what his life has become. ‘I always worried something would go wrong,’ Askel tells Julie, ‘but the things that went wrong were never what I worried about.’
Joachim Trier has said about The Worst Person in the World that he ‘wanted to make a film about love. One that goes a bit deeper than normal onscreen love stories, where everything is so simple, the stories so clear-cut, the feelings so admirably unambiguous. A film that will look seriously at the difficulties of meeting someone when you’re struggling to figure out your own life; at how irresolute and uncertain even the most rational and otherwise self-confident people can become when they fall in love; and how complicated it is, even for romantics, when they actually get what they have been dreaming about.’
And through Julie’s relationships with Askel and Eivind, the man she leaves him for, Trier achieves that. Julie is given everything she wants and yet she still makes decisions that undermine and damage these relationships. Trier doesn’t direct our judgement with these choices, giving us barely enough information to even understand why she make them, and so we are left to feel as confused and conflicted as Julie. She has the older man she needed to look after her and guide her when she was lost in her 20s, but who leaves her feeling disempowered and comparing herself to Bambi at the age of 30. She has the man she needs who is in exactly the same stage of life as her, also working in a shop with no grand career plans, also not wanting children and wanting to enjoy life, but that relationship can’t the survive the seriousness of real life; pregnancy, miscarriage and Askel’s death.
God, it always comes back to children and motherhood, doesn’t it? This is such a social raw nerve for people able to have children (or is it just me?) and heterosexual relationships can’t escape from this battleground as it feels like the patriarchy is using reproductive rights as its next (last?) big weapon. Moves to roll back reproductive rights and access to abortion around the world aren’t simply about being ‘pro-life’ but are much better understood as a way to control women. They are the darker side of ‘pro-natal’ policies where positive outcomes that help those of us who do want children, such as affordable childcare and access to parental leave, are used to mask the true intentions – ‘de facto coercive [strategies] to boost birth rates [by] making it difficult for people to access sexual and reproductive healthcare.’ And so deciding whether or not to have children has become a power struggle.
I’m reading Laurie Penny’s new book, Sexual Revolutions, and it is giving me the same feelings of clarity as this movie. Put simply, women don’t want to be defined by men anymore. Heterosexual women don’t want to settle for any old guy that will have her, have his children and become his domestic servant. Think about the low, low bar that women set for potential dates – They text back! They don’t sexually or physically assault me! – and it becomes obvious why we don’t want to settle for that anymore. Second-wave feminism told women that we could have it all; the current sexual revolution is us shouting back that we don’t want it. We’re OK without children. We’re OK without a career or a boyfriend. We can live independently and we don’t need approval from a man. From anyone. We don’t need the patriarchy anymore! Obviously, it’s wonderful that we can have all of this if we wanted, and the pressures to succeed are still very real and still weigh very heavily, but it is so freeing to realise that this could truly be a choice.
Trier managed to achieve something extraordinary in The Worst Person in the World because, for me at least, he has captured this intangible but important struggle – true choice versus obligation and expectation. I can’t stop thinking about the scene where Julie, then in her late 20s, was arguing with Askel, then in his 40s, about having children. Yes, Julie says, I want children but not now. There are things I want to do first. OK, Askel responds, what do you want to do? And, of course, Julie doesn’t have an answer. How do you answer that question when the answer is ‘live my life?’ But Askel gets frustrated because he really thinks he’s trying to accommodate her and doesn’t understand that it isn’t as simple as wanting to see the world or achieve a certain career step. And I loved that Aksel clearly finds this particularly difficult because (in his mind) Julie doesn’t seem to be doing anything to advance her career, still working in the university bookshop, and he can’t see what she’s waiting for. He’s pushing her to be ready but doesn’t understand that the conflict within Julie can’t be resolved that easily.
And, damn, The Worst Person in the World showed us the simplicity of the solution. Do what you want. Be what you want. And don’t settle until you find it. Perhaps it was cowardice to give Julie a miscarriage, rather than force an abortion discussion, but Julie’s wry smile in the scene after her miscarriage said it all for me. Having faced both choices, she now knows what she wants. She is free. And I loved that she was allowed to feel that, to show us that.
The movie ends with Julie obviously at peace with all of these choices that have troubled her throughout the movie. She’s happy in her career, happy to be single and living alone, and looking out at Eivind manhandling a baby into a pram with his new partner, and clearly feeling no jealousy or ill will towards him. It was so refreshing that it felt positively radical! I felt physically lighter for having seen it, elated and enlightened and so happy, despite having cried a lot.
As Stephanie Zacharek summed up in her brilliant review for Time, ‘the simple truth is that you can’t choose all the roads. And so you make peace with whatever path you’ve gotten yourself onto, as Julie ultimately does. If you don’t know whether to laugh or cry as you look back, that’s how you know you’ve arrived.’ What a fucking powerful film. What a beautiful and brilliant message!
NEXT TIME… The Power of the Dog
I went to see this purely on the strength of your enthusiastic tweet and I loved it. And I love this post. You’ve made me see so much more in the film so now I must watch it again!! Xx