Bless This Mess

"Stumbling toward self-knowledge in The Worst Person in the World."

- By Angelica Jade Bastién

JOACHIM TRIER’S The Worst Person in the World, the final film in his Oslo Trilogy, is stitched throughout with the color of longing. The director takes mun­dane desires and their attendant fears and elevates them to the level of the sacred, most sharply in a sequence about halfway through when the lead, Julie (Renate Reinsve), attends an intimate hangout with her new boyfriend, Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). Julie encourages the small group to do ’shrooms, and they lounge about until the trip kicks in.

THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD DIRECTED BY JOACHIM TRIER. NEON. R.

For Julie, it starts in the kitchen as the gray floor beneath her feet slowly shifts to resemble a ravaged sea. The crucial moment isn’t when she sees her disconnected, uncaring father or when she rips out her tampon, slathering her blood on her cheeks, but something far more unsettling: Julie’s youthful face on the body of an elderly, overweight woman, the hands of various figures from her reverie kneading her wrinkled, sun­ spotted flesh. Yet Julie doesn’t appear afraid or disgusted. She’s blissful. Many images have rooted themselves in my mind since I saw this film for the first time, but this one especially, shimmering with a ragged truth about the complications of coming of age and aging for women, is shot through with pathos.