Joachim Trier made a film about a woman resisting the feeling that her life is being written for her. He did not notice what he was doing with his chapter titles.
I. Julie Tries Medicine, Then Doesn’t, Which the Film Presents as Self-Knowledge
II. Julie Tries Photography, Which Is Closer But Still Someone Else’s Idea of Her
III. Julie Loves Aksel Across a Distance She Cannot Name and He Cannot Reduce
IV. Julie Runs Across Oslo While the World Stops — The Chapter That Requires Everyone Else to Freeze So That Julie Can Move Freely
V. Julie Does Not Want What She Is Expected to Want (This Chapter Recurs Without Being Numbered)
VI. Julie Wants Eivind, Who Is Also Unavailable, Which the Film Treats as Coincidence
VII. Julie Writes the Essay the Film Has Been Writing About Her
VIII. Aksel Is Dying and Julie Comes, and This Changes Everything That Came Before Without Changing Any of It
IX. Julie at the End of the Story She Has Been Inside Since the Prologue
X. Oslo, Later. The Camera Still Running. Julie, Still.
XI. The Chapter Where Becoming Yourself Looks Identical to Where You Started
XII. Epilogue: In Which the Narrator Withdraws and Leaves Julie Alone at Last, Which Is What She Wanted, Which Is Also What the Narrator Wanted to Give Her
These are not the film’s chapter titles. They are what the chapter titles would say if the structure were honest about what it is doing to Julie, rather than what it is doing for her.
| Director | Joachim Trier |
|---|---|
| Year | 2021 |
| Runtime | 128 minutes |
| Cast | Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum |
| Award | Best Actress, Cannes 2021 (Reinsve); Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film |
| Streaming | MUBI, Criterion Channel |
Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021) follows Julie (Renate Reinsve) across roughly four years of her late twenties and early thirties in Oslo: through medical school abandoned, through photography pursued, through a serious relationship with the older graphic novelist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), through a party where she meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) and runs across the city to be with him while time freezes around her, through a viral essay, through Aksel’s terminal cancer diagnosis, through the slow and unglamorous work of becoming someone. The film is structured in a prologue, twelve chapters, and an epilogue, each introduced with a title card and occasionally by a narrator whose tone is warm, ironic, precisely calibrated to the feeling of watching someone you love make the same mistake slightly differently than before. Renate Reinsve won Best Actress at Cannes in 2021. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It was received, almost universally, as one of the defining portraits of millennial female interiority in contemporary cinema — a film that takes Julie’s restlessness seriously, that treats her inability to settle as a genuine condition rather than a character flaw, that extends to the choices she makes the same warmth it extends to the choices she doesn’t. That reading is accurate about what the film intends. What it is not, quite, is accurate about what the film’s structure is doing while the warmth is being extended.
Julie spends the film resisting the feeling that her life is being authored by someone else’s expectations. By Aksel’s implicit desire for a child. By the biological timeline that the world keeps presenting to her as an argument. By the social script that says: you are at the age where you should be choosing, and choosing means narrowing, and narrowing means becoming the specific person the narrowing produces rather than the person who was capable of any number of different narrowings. She resists all of this with a stubbornness that the film treats as its most loveable quality — the quality that makes Julie the kind of person you want to keep watching, that makes The Worst Person in the World the kind of film you want to watch twice. And then the chapter title card appears. And then the narrator introduces the next phase. And then the chapter ends and the next one begins, and the film’s most fundamental formal gesture — the thing it does more consistently and more explicitly than any other technical choice — is to take Julie’s life and divide it into numbered units with titles and introductions and conclusions, which is the most complete act of authorship available to narrative cinema, and which is the precise thing Julie is trying not to have done to her.
The film believes the chapters are generous. It believes that giving each phase of Julie’s life its own titled space is a form of respect — a way of saying: this moment matters, this relationship had its own integrity, this version of you was real and is worth naming. And the chapters are generous, in that sense. They are also the form of someone else’s story. A narrator who introduces each section of your life has already decided that your life has sections. A chapter title has already decided what the section was about before you have finished living it. Julie is searching, across the film’s full length, for the experience of her own life that is not already organised by an account of it. The film gives her twelve accounts and calls them freedom.
Julie spends two hours resisting the feeling that her life is being written for her. The chapter titles are the writing. The film cannot see that these are the same problem.
The freeze sequence is the film’s most formally extraordinary image and its most quietly self-incriminating gesture. Julie has just met Eivind at a party. She is in a relationship with Aksel. She decides, somewhere between the party and the street outside, that she is going to run across Oslo to Eivind right now, without calculation, without waiting, without the elaborate negotiation with herself that the film has shown her performing throughout every other significant decision. She steps outside and the world stops. Every person in Oslo is suspended mid-gesture: a couple mid-argument, a cyclist mid-turn, a child mid-reach toward something on a table. The streets belong entirely to Julie, who moves through them at a run, across bridges, through intersections, her breath the only sound in a city that has been paused to accommodate her. The sequence is presented as the film’s most complete image of spontaneous desire — the moment Julie finally acts on exactly what she wants without consulting the part of herself that organises things into chapters. It is also, on close examination, the moment that most precisely reveals what the film cannot say about the nature of Julie’s freedom.
The frozen world is a world from which consequence has been removed. No one can see Julie moving. No one is affected by her passage. The couple frozen mid-argument will resume their argument when time restarts and will not know that Julie ran past them while they were stopped. The child will reach the object on the table without knowing that someone else’s story was proceeding at full speed three feet away. Julie’s freedom in the freeze is not the freedom of genuine choice — of choosing in full awareness of what the choosing costs and who else it moves. It is the freedom of choice without witness, without accountability, without the friction of other people’s stories running alongside and against her own. The film’s most beautiful image of liberation is its most precise portrait of what liberation, for Julie, has always required: the world holding still so that she can be the only thing moving in it. She is not free in the freeze. She is alone in it, which the film has confused with the same thing, and which Julie may also have confused with the same thing, and which the film cannot examine directly because examining it directly would mean asking whether Julie’s restlessness is a form of vitality or a form of flight, and the film loves Julie too completely to hold both possibilities open at once.
Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) is the film that illuminates The Worst Person in the World most usefully, and the comparison is not comfortable for either film. Both are about a woman in her late twenties in a major city who cannot quite locate the version of herself that matches the life she is living. Both treat their protagonist’s restlessness with warmth rather than judgment. But Baumbach uses no chapters, no narrator, no title cards. The camera follows Frances with an immediacy that refuses the framing device — there is no structure that says: this section of her life was about this. The film discovers what Frances’s life is about at the same time Frances does, in the same order, without retrospective organisation. The form and the content are making the same argument simultaneously. Trier’s film makes a different choice: it knows what each section of Julie’s life is about before the section begins, tells you the title, and then shows you the section. The warmth is real. The foreknowledge is also real. What Baumbach refuses to claim — that a life can be narrated in advance of its being lived — is precisely what Trier’s structure claims on every title card, and the film never examines whether that claiming is itself the thing Julie is trying to escape.
Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) uses a similar episodic structure — discrete titled sections, a relationship dissolving across them — and the comparison is illuminating precisely because Bergman’s titles are blunt rather than literary, his structure clinical rather than warm, and there is no narrator. The episodes in Scenes from a Marriage have the quality of case files rather than chapters: this happened, then this. Bergman does not tell you what the section means before you watch it. He barely tells you what it meant after. The ironic tenderness of Trier’s narrator — the voice that loves Julie and knows what is coming — is the formal element that distinguishes the two films most completely, and also the element that most precisely enacts what Julie is resisting. The narrator knows. Julie does not. The gap between them is the film’s warmth and its central structural imposition simultaneously, and Trier, who built the gap deliberately and with great skill, cannot quite see it from inside the warmth he built it with.
The Worst Person in the World is the most precisely observed portrait of a specific kind of contemporary female restlessness that cinema has produced in years — the restlessness of a person who is genuinely multiple, who contains more versions of herself than any single relationship or career or city can accommodate, and who moves between versions not from inconstancy but from a honesty about her own complexity that the structures around her cannot hold. Julie is not the worst person in the world. She is a person the world has not yet built adequate structures for. The film understands this completely and loves her for it, and it gives her twelve chapters and a narrator and a prologue and an epilogue and calls this understanding. It is understanding. It is also the inadequate structure, rebuilt with greater warmth, applied again. The freeze ends. The world resumes. Oslo moves around her as if she had never been still.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, 2012): the film that makes the same argument about millennial female restlessness without a narrator, without chapter titles, without retrospective organisation — the camera discovering what Frances’s life is about at the same time she does, which is either more honest or less kind than what Trier does with Julie, and which illuminates by contrast exactly what the chapter structure of The Worst Person in the World is quietly claiming.
Scenes from a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973): the episodic structure Trier inherits, used without irony or warmth or a narrator who loves the protagonist — Bergman’s titled sections have the quality of case files rather than chapters, and placing the two films side by side shows what the narrator’s tenderness in The Worst Person in the World is protecting Julie from, which is also what it is protecting the audience from, which may or may not be the same protection.
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