In THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, director Joachim Trier tackles love, life, sex, drugs, death and everything in-between. He and lead actor Renate Reinsve tell us how they turned the romcom on its head

WORDS STEVE ROSE

“The day after the premiere, I woke up and I puked and cried,” says The Worst Person In The World’s lead actor Renate Reinsve. This was at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. “I was very scared to show the movie for the first time in front of 2,500 people. I was very self-critical. I thought, ‘Okay, the film is perfect, but I ruined the whole thing.’”

The Cannes jury disagreed: Reinsve won the Best Actress award. The critics also disagreed, showering the 34-year-old actor with “a star is born” levels of praise. The Norwegian Oscar Committee also disagreed: The Worst Person In The World is the country’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar this year.

Despite its highly specific focus, the film seems to have struck a chord with everyone who has seen it.

The Worst Person In The World has been described as a “romantic comedy”, although that doesn’t completely do it justice. It is both hilarious and beguilingly romantic at times, but in step with Reinsve’s heroine, Julie, it is also messy, complicated and unpredictable.

Closer to real life, you might say, except the story also takes some wild departures from reality, not least a bonkers, semi-animated magic-mushroom trip (which somehow culminates with Julie removing her tampon, smearing her face with blood, then throwing it at her father). There is also a gorgeous, literally show-stopping scene where time freezes and everyone in the city is reduced to statues. At the same time, the film is unafraid to get into the tangled weeds of human existence, addressing eternal themes of regret, guilt and mortality. It’s not this or that, it’s this and that. Director and co-writer Joachim Trier calls it “a film for grown-ups who still feel like they don’t know how to grow up.” Isn’t that all of us?

Reinsve holds the film together, which is no mean feat since Julie’s chief character-trait is her inconsistency. Within the opening minutes, she has switched from studying medicine to psychology to photography to working in a bookstore, with accompanying changes of hairstyle, outfit and boyfriend for each. Over the subsequent 12 chapters, spanning four years of Julie’s life, she scrolls through a carousel of identities, and falls deeply in and out of love with two different men. “I love you, and I don’t love you,” she tells one of them, cryptically. She doesn’t know what she wants, so she proceeds almost by a process of elimination, stumbling into experiences, realising what she doesn’t want and messily moving on. She’s not really the worst person in the world. No more than the rest of us.