The Worst Person in the World captures one woman’s late-twenties in a swirl of sunsets, cigarettes and sunrises

► The Worst Person in the World is in UK cinemas from March 25 and will be available to stream on MUBI UK and Ireland from May 13. 

“A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road…” So begins the Art Garfunkel cover of ‘The Waters of March’, the closing-credits song that matches the shimmering, scurrying rhythms of Joachim Trier’s lovely, flighty The Worst Person in the World so perfectly that it’s possible to suspect the entire movie was reverse-engineered from this one soundtrack cue. Antônio Carlos Jobim’s lyrics are a list of semi-random objects and entities – the sun, night, the rest of a stump, a little alone, a sliver of glass, a trap, a gun – a litany of fragments and feelings sent tumbling through the melody the way a stream tumbles through pebbles and bracken. So it is with the incidents and accidents that mark the roughly four-year stretch around the 30th birthday of beautiful, bright yet floundering Julie (Renate Reinsve, a deserving winner of the Cannes Best Actress award) as she rattles around Oslo like a loose marble catching occasional shafts of fresh, pale Norwegian sunlight.

“Julie disappointed herself,” is the first thing the wry, reflexive voiceover tells us, setting up the Julie-to-Julie relationship which will be, despite the men she falls in love with, the film’s key romance. Julie is far from the worst person in the world, but she can sometimes behave like she’s the only person, and Trier’s film, dazzled by Reinsve’s luminosity and generous to Julie’s faults to a fault, colludes with this solipsistic perspective. A brisk prologue – the film is arranged into 12 chapters and bookended – acquaints us tartly with her reasons for dissatisfaction: she’s in that twentysomething moment that comes for many bright young things, when it’s no longer cute to have ‘potential’, when promise is supposed to have sublimated into something tangible.

Julie, first a medical student dumping a boyfriend, is now a psychology major with a pink dye-job dating her professor – and, wait, no, now she’s a photographer. Before a Christopher Cross ‘Ride like the Wind’ montage has even ended (the canny soundtrack features slice upon slice of perfectly ripe cheese that pairs sublimely with the mood of the moment), Julie, enlivened by her new artsy scene, has come to a bar with her current beau, and left with Aksel (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), the 44-year-old creator of a successful underground comic strip.

Aksel accurately prophesies the exact reason their relationship will eventually end and ruefully suggests she leave before it begins. Julie gets three steps down the staircase before returning to him, giddy with love. She moves in and, in the first of several nods to Woody Allen, Billie Holiday’s ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ toots jazzily over shots of the pair commingling their book collections and bickering over closet space. Neither can stop smiling.

Their relationship has its frustrations: Julie tries to fit in with Aksel’s friends, but their domestic stability makes her ambivalence about having kids an issue and heightens her insecurity about not having achieved much beyond a job in a bookstore, and a one-off magazine article titled ‘Oral sex in the age of #MeToo’. The scene in which she writes that piece, incidentally, is a superb sampler of Reinsve’s deceptively breezy performance: the interplay of mischief, boredom, irritation, sudden inspiration and then actual creative application occurs in about 20 spontaneous microexpressions that scud across her face like clouds, keenly observed by Kasper Tuxen’s clean, subtle camera.

Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt have collaborated on all Trier’s features to date, including Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011), the other two entries in Trier’s loosely thematic ‘Oslo Trilogy’. They have an uncanny facility for concertinaing time. Months may pass in the blink of a cut, only for a scant instant to telescope out into a luxuriantly explored diorama. In one such instant, Julie meets Eivind (a charmingly goofy, sincere Herbert Nordrum) at a party she has casually gatecrashed, and, attracted to each other but determined not to cheat on their partners, they play a swooningly flirtatious game of ‘everything but’. One drinks from the other’s glass, they watch each other pee, Eivind inhales the cigarette smoke spilling from Julie’s mouth, blowing it back in slow motion across her lips and cheeks. And later, after a chance encounter rekindles their connection, Julie actually stops time with the flick of a magical light switch, and races across a city frozen in suspended animation, to Eivind, the only other person in motion. The elation of these bigger-on-the-inside fantasy sequences accurately mimics the slippery, conspiratorial free-fall of new love, but Julie cannot really trick time, when time is ticking, tricking her right back.

The film is sunsets and cigarettes and sunrises and Julie’s carelessly elegant habit of wearing her long hair tucked inside her collar. It skips by. But the sum total of all these glinting, silvery moments cannot but be a little evanescent, especially to anyone outside Julie’s precise generational and lifestage cohort. To those not directly relating to her winsome predicaments, or those who only vaguely remember experiencing them, harsher questions than the film is willing to answer, may occur. Would her self-confessed “flakiness” be quite so appealing if it didn’t come in such a vibrantly attractive package? And should we spare a thought for those characters who are carefully developed and beautifully performed, but who ultimately exist only to help Julie, to forgive her, to tell her that their sole regret in life is not making her realise how wonderful she is?

As if to reinforce Julie’s specialness, there’s a catty edge to the way her peers are sketched. The other young women in her psych class all have “borderline eating disorders”; Eivind’s ex-girlfriend Sunniva (Maria Grazia Di Meo) is mocked for her passionate overcommitment to environmental causes (she’s the “sum of Western guilt”); the “post-feminist” commentator who challenges Aksel on a radio show is humourless and strident.

Julie, by contrast, is so lightly, brightly embodied by Reinsve that it’s possible not to notice how much the deck is stacked in her favour, or not to care. It’s an odd way of having your cake and eating it: if you’re a millennial watching The Worst Person in the World you get to be flattered by an ostensible critique, rather like how Warren Beatty must feel when he listens to ‘You’re So Vain’. If you’re anyone else, you probably don’t think this song is about you – because it isn’t – but still, the tune is catchy and the swirl of mood and melody is a supple if fleeting delight.