Portrait of an Everywoman as work-in-progress

by | Mar 10, 2022 | 0 comments

In her review of “The Worst Person in the World”, Washington Post film critic has glowing praise for this Oscar-nominated film and Cannes “Best Actress” winner Renate Reinsve.

“Julie’s a bit of a mess. When we meet her, she has no sooner enrolled in pre-med courses at a Norwegian university than she’s shifted her major to psychology — no wait, art. She’s all over the map. Her love life is just as prone to last-minute switchbacks. To paraphrase the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, she doesn’t know what she wants until she screws it up.

As portrayed by the luminous Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World, Julie takes “relatable” to a new and transcendent level. The movie — a shimmering, generous, exhilarating coming-of-young-middle-age tale — wraps itself around her like the multicolored throw she brings with each apartment move. Julie is Everywoman as work-in-progress: a restless, protean creature whose outward mien of self-possession disguises the impulses at her molten core.

Written and directed by Joachim Trier — and nominated for two Oscars this week, for Trier and Eskil Vogt’s screenplay and for best international feature — The Worst Person in the World unfolds with a linear straightforwardness that belies its exuberant wildness. Ostensibly, the movie chronicles Julie’s attempts to find herself, a search that is complicated by her relationship with an older, famous cartoonist named Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), her ambivalence about becoming a mother and unresolved issues with her own family of origin. While Aksel enjoys the renown of being an avatar of pop-culture edginess (while preparing to have his comic book adapted into a mainstream movie), Julie works as a clerk in a bookstore, at one point writing an essay that promises to vault her into viral celebrity. It doesn’t, but the ideas she’s percolating — about the sexist taboos around representing female desire and physicality — will be revisited by Trier in some of the movie’s most dazzling and memorable scenes.”

excerpted from “The Worst Person in the World movie review: Portrait of an Everywoman as work-in-progress”, by Ann Hornaday, Washington Post, February 9, 2022. Link to full article.

The Naro will be presenting The Worst Person in the World, starting Friday, March 11th – please see our calendar for dates and times

 

 

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