On The Worst Person in the World

BY NATALIA RUSZKOWSKI

WE ARE ALL our own ‘worst person in the world.’ Julie is no different. She is aimless, flaky, and cowardly. She cannot decide on one vocation or lover. She cannot confront her father’s futility in being her father. She cannot decide on one life, nor can she deal with the one that was given to her.

The Worst Person in the World is a film about reconciliation. It is about what it means to reconcile with the fact that you are the worst person you know. You cherish no faith but that which is most elusive: contentment. In searching for this utopia, you abandon professions with little feeling, you abruptly end relationships and jump quickly into new ones, you adapt to a new life think - ing, finally, only to realize that no, that is not who you are or what you want after all. With that sudden realization, the cycle begins anew. What makes the film so special is that it does not condemn this cycle of change. It is easy to lapse into self-hatred when trying to figure out who you are; you feel the weight of Aksel’s words, ‘In any case, you’ll have other relationships, and you’ll realize what we had was unique,’ when Julie breaks up with him. They attempt to sentence Julie to a life of regret, a life not of What if I did? but What if I didn’t? The film sees Julie grapple with feelings of the latter. She leaves Aksel for Eivind in search of a reprieve from the suffoca - tion and inadequacy she feels with Aksel, who is more esteemed in his professional success and older, and therefore ready for more, for the life that comes with settling down. She crashes a party after leaving his book release event early; there, she meets Eivind, and they are together until dawn, intimate in the way you are with someone you know you will never see again. But by chance, they do see one another again, and neither of them is satisfied with the ‘almost’ of their shared night. Time stops — quite literally, Julie flicks a light switch, pausing the world — until they reunite. They are intensely happy until Eivind’s idiosyncrasies begin to become overbearing, by which time Julie also discovers she is pregnant.

Julie’s pregnancy is the crux of her development in the film; it is the summation of her worry. She fears the end of her independent life before she truly knows her independent self. She fears that she is a product of her father’s detachment, that she will endow her child with the same perpetual feeling of inadequacy that she has been subject to. She begins to wonder whether her decisions have been the right ones. This line of thinking returns her to Aksel, who she visits in the hospital after hearing he is dying, having been diagnosed with cancer. Despite her worries, she tells Aksel that she plans on keeping the child. He helps soothe her worries about moth - erhood, insisting she will be a good mother. They share a poignant moment when he tells her that he alone harbors memories of her that she has forgotten, and that these memories will cease to exist when he dies. It is a moving reminder that to live is to be forgotten. After a life of searching and choosing and then searching and choosing again, Julie comes to terms with the fact that contentment is not subject to the laws of an input/output system. To make a choice is not to guarantee an outcome. To learn this is to try and fail to mold change into linearity – which Julie does, again and again. She bears the weight of this false linearity by wondering what could have been if she had decided differently. Yet choice and change, in turn, are made volatile once deconstructed. Julie’s pregnancy is perhaps the perfect way to show this — it is one of the more extreme products of chance. It happening to Julie is a subtle reminder that choice, chance, and change interact and happen with each other. The burden of What if’s lessens in light of these incalculable probabilities that deny careful analysis and planning.

Julie’s relationship to change is transformed into something near surrender by the end of the film. Aksel voices this transformation in the hospital, reflecting, ‘I wasted so much time worrying about what could go wrong.

But what did go wrong, was never the things I was worried about.’ Not long after he speaks these words, Julie has a miscarriage.

The end of the film sees Julie as a still photographer. She is untethered for the first time after breaking up with Eivind. The scene has wrapped; the female actress reflects dejectedly on her performance, unable to fill the scene with the emotion of being left at the dinner table. Julie tells her to use that dejection and takes a few shots. The film then cuts to Julie as she puts her equipment away, quickly glancing out of the window. Below is Eivind, holding a baby, a stroller idle near him. The actress Julie had just taken portraits of walks towards him, and Eivind passes her the baby, a subtle inclination that the child is hers, too. This fact is confirmed when she kisses Eivind and the two begin to walk away.

Change comes to Julie unanticipated, despite her attempts to control it. Her self-blame and regret dissipate when she accepts that life is not delineated by the choices you make and the ones you don’t. Chance, in the form of miscarriages and small-world relationships, refuses this simple ‘choosing’ of who you want to be. Julie comes to accept these impossible fluctuations, relinquishing her title of ‘worst person in the world’ and offering the viewer a similar reprieve from this condemnation.