Julia (Renate Rainswe), a medical student, discovers in time that surgery is not her vocation and leaves her studies and switches to psychology. Her interests soon change again and she begins to take photographs and eventually becomes a salesgirl in a bookshop, while also thinking about a literary career. Finding her way is accompanied by adventures of love. Easy and short-lived romances alternate, until finally she meets the handsome and intelligent Axel (Anders Danielsen Lieu), author of the popular comics about Lynx, a wild bully cat who shocks the society of respectable domestic cats. Passion flares between the characters and they soon move in together, but gradually the age difference makes itself felt. The 30-year-old Julia does not want a family, she is sure that she still needs to do something important in her life before devoting it to her child. The 44-year-old Axel is fully developed as a man and an artist, he has a completely different social circle, and often his and Julia’s worlds do not intersect. Longing and self-consciousness push the heroine towards a new experience in life that puts their serene union with Axel at stake.
Norwegian Joakim Trier bears little resemblance to his distant relative Lars von Trier. The theme of his work is the inner pain of modern man, his confusion before difficulties, before life itself. Trier’s characters seek happiness, which, they are convinced, lies in self-expression and empathy. “The Worst Man in the World”, nominated for an Oscar in the categories “Best International Film” and “Best Screenplay”, focuses on the life of thirty-year-old Julia, who “both rushes to live and rushes to feel”, makes mistakes and, in general, knows herself.
The heroine herself becomes a spectator and a witness to her life. Julia tells her story, and the narrator, the unseen voice, is her, as if describing herself from the sidelines. The film itself takes a novel form, divided into 12 chapters with a prologue and an epilogue. Life as a novel, broken up into fragments, sometimes quite small, as if random encounters that will become fateful, to minor conversations that are deposited in the heart.
The film, and with it the heroine, wonder what motherhood is, how to be a mother in a modern world that seems to be steadily going downhill. A man can spend half his life on self-realization, but does not have time to find the strength to take responsibility for another. Julia is afraid to start a family before she has found herself, and one of her partners, Iwind (Herbert Nordrum), does not want to condemn a child to suffering, convinced that a climate crisis awaits humanity. Is it even possible to realize life outside of family and children, is it normal not to have a “maternal sense” and live in constant anxiety about the future?
“The Worst Man in the World” asks a lot of questions, but does not rush to answer them, instead responding to them with the personal experiences of the characters. Arguments about feminism, literature, psychoanalysis and family all seem to form some basis for their lives. But also Axel, a celebrated comic book writer, understands deep down that the real value is not knowledge and creative successes, but the intimacy of the moment, the careful study of himself and others. The dynamics of their relationship with Julia demonstrates this very precisely, and the actors Anders Danielsen Lie and Renate Rainsve, who won an award at Cannes for this role, live out their characters’ feelings with candor and conviction.
Trier meticulously immerses the viewer in the lives of his characters. And in order to portray their sense of self, the director often resorts to artistic conventionality: there are dramatic montage cut-ins and single phantasmagoric scenes which illustrate Julia’s inner world, her fears and aspirations. However, the director’s formalistic approach somewhat alienates the film from the viewer, making it more difficult, rather than helping him immerse himself in the character. The contrast between realism and conventionality is not always beneficial, and sometimes ruins the atmosphere of cold Oslo, which is so valuable to the author. However, the rough structure of “The Worst Man in the World” is smoothed out by the coherent cast and the lively characters, with whose stories it is not difficult to associate.
So who is the “worst person” here? At one point, Aivind – Julia’s lover – calls himself such, because he didn’t provide the support he needed for his ex-girlfriend, who seems overly enthusiastic about yoga and saving the world. Is cheating on a partner a betrayal, and where are the boundaries of it? What is the separation of two people in the context of one life, which, and the film makes us remember this, is finite. Love and passion, despair and sex all become memories, clots of the past, visions like the one Julia experiences under the influence of mushrooms in one scene. Everything is jumbled up, and it’s sometimes impossible to make out one’s own features among other people’s mirrors, other people’s destinies and trajectories. “I want something more!” – declares the heroine. But she herself cannot answer what it is. Do doubts and endless searching make us “worse” people? Hardly, says the director.