The little Norwegian film that won hearts
Actress Renate Reinsve and director Joachim Trier talk about how they channelled their life experiences into the Oscar-nominated drama that even Barack Obama loves
When Joachim Trier took The Worst Person in the World to Cannes in July 2021, he couldn’t have imagined the journey that was to come – one that took him all the way to the Oscars.
This “little Norwegian film” – Trier’s fifth – coming from a country with a population of just over 5 million saw the film industry take notice. When you get the likes of Knocked Up filmmaker Judd Apatow tweeting it’s “stunning” and “remarkable”, you know you’ve done something right.
The film’s star, Renate Reinsve, won Best Actress in Cannes, beating the likes of Tilda Swinton and Marion Cotillard. Largely unknown outside Norway, she finished the festival being feted by some of the best performers on the planet.
“Who should I mention?” she blushes, when I ask who came up to her after seeing the film. “Isabelle Huppert – who I’ve been a fan of my whole life and is the greatest actress on Earth. She told me that I was good, and I was like, ‘OK, I can quit now’.”
Reinsve was also nominated for a BAFTA and was signed up by fashion giant Louis Vuitton as a brand ambassador. Meanwhile, Trier’s film became only the sixth Norwegian film ever to compete at the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language category. Even more remarkably, it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.
The acclaim didn’t stop there. Former US President Barack Obama added the film to his “Favourite Movies of 2021” list, a selection he compiles annually. “That was also, like, a big thing,” Reinsve says.
Wherever it’s played, The Worst Person in the World has won people over. Told in 12 chapters, the film follows the exploits of Julie (played by Reinsve), a woman about to turn 30 who has yet to find her true calling in life.
At the outset, she calls time on her med school education, switching to psychology, before trying her hand at writing a blog about oral sex. She’s equally non-committal in her relationships; when she meets a comic-book artist, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), who is 15 years older, she doesn’t feel ready to commit to a family.
When Reinsve read the script it felt instantly familiar: it recalled conversations she’d had with Trier when they would occasionally bump into each other in the years after she made her screen debut, briefly, in Trier’s second film, 2011’s Oslo, August 31st. (That film, together with The Worst Person in the World and Trier’s 2006 debut Reprise, completes a loose “Oslo” trilogy.)
“We would end up having these deep existential conversations instantly. I think we’re very aligned on the thoughts on life being just chaos. It’s really hard to make relationships. Because it’s scary to be close to someone.”
Ask Trier what he and his writing partner Eskil Vogt drew from for the film and he has two words:
“life experience”. “I’ve been watching people around me, friends, going through things,” he says.
The 48-year-old also drew from his own relationships: both when he was young and insecure about wanting a family, and later when he was ready to settle down but was with someone younger. “I feel I’ve been both Julie and Aksel at different times in my life.”
He did not, he promises, simply borrow from the 34-yearold Reinsve. “We’re dealing with yearning for a certainty of identity, questions of belonging and ambition, and how to grapple with intimacy,” he says.
“More than [it] being something where I had had a coffee with her and thought, ‘Ooh, I’ll steal that scene that she told me about’ … it’s not like that. But it’s the possibility of her talents that we saw as a driving force.”
Intriguingly, Reinsve came close to quitting acting after being left unsatisfied by many of the cash-poor productions she had been in.
“We had [little] time and you were supposed to nail it, and you were very alone. So I really didn’t like it; it felt like something I didn’t want to do any more … I needed a big break or to quit and I did that the day before Joachim called me. So it was very, very strange coincidence.”
Trier was relieved he convinced her otherwise. “I think she should act … we need her in front of a camera at least once in a while.”
To prepare to play Julie, a millennial heading into a quarter-life crisis, Reinsve watched both Diane Keaton’s turn in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and Timothée Chalamet’s work as a lovelorn teen in Call Me by Your Name.
“I think what’s striking about [Reinsve’s] performance is a sense of truth,” Trier says.
“Truth is more about mystery than just knowing everything. It’s about Renate understanding the ambivalence of something in the character and then letting that event happen when the character is confronted with that.”
Yet none of this quite conveys the unique flavour of the film, or Trier’s visual innovations that crack open Julie’s psychology – such as the now-famous moment where, running to meet a lover, everything freezes around her – cars, cyclists, pedestrians.
“[It comes from] the deeprooted wish we all have that we could freeze all reality and run away [and] experience something like a fairy tale, like Cinderella for a night, and then come back and put time into play and know what we need to do,” Trier says.
There’s also the trippy, unsettling scene where Julie takes magic mushrooms and hallucinates that she’s ageing – while also confronting her late father.
I think she should act … we need her in front of a camera at least once in a while
DIRECTOR JOACHIM TRIER ON RENATE REINSVE
Filmmakers that allow themselves to be playful … can achieve things others can’t
JOACHIM TRIER, DIRECTOR AND SCRIPTWRITER
“I think filmmakers that are allowing themselves to be playful with the medium can achieve things that others can’t,” Trier says. “It can get vulgar or silly, and it’s a risk.”
Reinsve was impressed by what Trier and his co-writer set out to do. “I think they’ve actually been curious about what it’s like to be a woman.”
And yet perhaps the most poignant scene involves the older Aksel talking about how life as he knows it is slipping away from him. No longer is your life ahead of you; time is passing and you’re staring at old age.
“When you talk to someone who’s 30, they haven’t gone through that yet. That’s something that happens mostly in your 40s; that something happens with culture where you really feel that things are changing.”
It all combines to make The Worst Person in the World one of those impossible to categorise films that seems to sum up life in all its complexities.