Review: THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

Julie hasn't worked out what she wants to do. Her twenties are ticking over and she still can't quite land in a pursuit she loves. Her mother gives her blessing to Julie whenever she changes course, be it medicine, psychology, photography or just the bookshop where she gets a job. It's the same with men. Her psych lecturer offers his class the hypothesis that he and Julie meet at a partyand four Instagram photos later, they've had an affair. She falls for the hunky photographic model on an assignment but then ditches him for a comic book artist she meets at a bar. And so on. She likes being in a couple but not joining the other's family. When that and the question of children comes up she pursues someone she has met at a party she crashes. When that gets too complicated.... you get the idea.

We follow Julie through a series of decisions both beneficial and quietly disastrous as she moves through a life in which she feels she is a self spectator rather than an actor. Conversations, even those had with significant partners about deeply significant things can feel as though she can't decide which of the sincere and contradictory statements she should make. She is the antihero without the machismo. If she were on the beach in Algiers instead of Mersault she might have turned the gun to the waves to see how the bullets sounded when they hit the water. 

If we baulk at affording her some sympathy (assuming empathy is impossible) we might ask ourselves why we tolerate so much of Camus' square peg. Does Julie need to be put on trial for her caprices for us to take her seriously? There's a sequence where the narrator (possibly her mother or older self, it's not stated) takes us on a tour of the matrilineal line of Julie's ancestry from her staunchly single mother, her theatre star grandmother, and so on back to the early 19th century where the family portrait shows us a woman paralysed by unhappiness. 

I was wondering why I was letting her off easily but now recall friends of mine who have done very similar things for real. If they have severed themselves from partners or abandoned domestic situations I can recall that I am quicker to try to understand why it's happened than I am to judge. Time after time I have seen relief rather than happiness on their faces or heard it in their voices as almost all of them are aware of the sadness, anger or grief fomenting in their wakes. In such situations you really just have to ask how you can help and keep your pontificating to yourself. That's very close to how I began to treat this fictional character. And then, in the final scene, the reward is a subtle one, containing no bellows of triumph nor whines of self-pathos. She might have wasted her youth (many do) but it's not without a few lessons that stick.

This reaction would have been impossible without the screen presence of Renate Reinsve, who gives Julie the nuance we need to keep up with her. If you don't feel fondness for her in this energetic and powerful turn then this will be a very long two hours in a cinema seat. But to look at the lengthy sex-free seduction at the party between her and Eivind or the later and equally unconsummated stolen encounter with him in a moment of frozen time you should be feeling your values pecked at by both your conscience and your id. A scene of frenzied breakup sex takes a turn well away from convention and illustrates the devotion her then partner feels for them as a pair, giving us surprises of candour rather than violence. A later scene where Julie witnesses the video of an interview with that ex that goes wildly off the rails as the latter insists on a position he's fallen into with the same kind of force he knew from fighting with Julie, as though he's channeling her.

This highly committed film will not be for everybody and even those it does suit might not meet it as a comedy. In the sense that comedy is the workings of the universe laid bare this does qualify but it doesn't play like The Philadelphia Story or Pretty Woman. It does end in warmth but it's the warmth of your pockets on a cold day, not a hearth fire.