The Worst Person in the World movie review: warped, magical take on Scandi realism

This larky Norwegian comedy about a woman on the cusp of turning 30 could nab two Oscars this weekend

This Sunday, a larky, adults-only, Norwegian comedy could win two Oscars. Made for roughly £4.2m, the last segment of Joachim Trier’s “Oslo trilogy” has been attracting prizes ever since its Cannes premiere and, despite the subtitles, has connected with US audiences (its opening weekend average was the third-biggest of the pandemic era). I found some of it aggravating, but was won over by a key scene in which a coquettish young feminist pees in front of a stranger she fancies and accidentally punctuates the emptying of her bladder with a fart. When the wind blows, and on many other occasions, this is the best film in the world.

A prologue, epilogue and twelve chapters, (with headings like “Oral Sex in the Age of MeToo”), nudge us through a deliberately will-o-the-wisp plot. Oslo native Julie (Renate Reinsve) effortlessly collects cool jobs and adoring boyfriends, but seems oddly detached from her life and is always looking for the next big thing, for reasons that are probably connected to her dad, a self-absorbed slug of a man who views Julie as old news.

Whilst going out with hip, feted, fortysomething cartoonist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) – the creator of Bobcat, a feline who possesses an “iconic butthole” - Julie gatecrashes a party, where she meets the aforementioned stranger, a barista called Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). Sometime later, a loved-up Julie runs through Oslo and is astonished to observe that everyone but her is frozen in time. Ditching one relationship for another makes her feel super-human. As cheekily omnipotent as Marvel’s Quicksilver, or Sonic the Hedgehog, Julie re-arranges the limbs of an entwined couple, so that the woman is now groping her boyfriend’s bum.

To say that The Worst Person in the World was bottom-centric would be an understatement. It is adorably earthy. That said, it can also be conservative with a small ‘c’.

Films about vaguely rudderless women, who let off steam by sprinting down boulevards, are not unheard of (see Frances Ha and Licorice Pizza). In a way, such portraits privilege the privileged. The main characters are young, trendy and live in cities that are the epitome of glamour. Would the world be gripped by the sight of a middle-aged frump, pelting ecstatically through Slough? I suspect not.

Still, it’s deeply satisfying to meet a heroine who’s not consumed by the desire to get married, or have a baby. Julie wrestles with the meaning of life and, like Virgina Woolf’s legendary ponderer Mrs Ramsay, deftly interrogates her own lines of thought. Julie tells Aksel that if she leaves him she’ll be like “Bambi on the ice”, and doesn’t hear his reply, because she’s so astonished by the implication of those words. The narrator explains, “She was thinking about how, at the age of 30, she’d just compared herself to Bambi.”

Reinsve does a wonderful job of clueing us into Julie’s mood swings and the moment where the character breaks the fourth wall is ingenious (Reinsve’s quite the winker).

The Worst Person in the World shares DNA with Thomas Vinterberg’s 2020 Oscar-winner, Another Round. Luckily, Trier’s project is far more profound. A warped take on Scandi realism, it takes us somewhere truly magical.

128mins, cert 15

In cinemas

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