The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World

One of the best movies of last year, Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” charts the tumultuous early adulthood of Julie (Renate Reinsve), a young woman searching desperately for any sense that her life is heading in the right direction. Shifting between jobs and relationships across four chaotic years, as the initial momentum of her 20s gives way to the existential anxiety of her 30s, Julie never quite identifies that greater purpose. But as she navigates romances with two different men—world-weary Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) and easygoing Eivind (Herbert Nordrum)—Julie begins to discover herself more fully. As charming and indecisive as Julie herself, this Norwegian romantic comedy is staged novelistically, in 14 parts, but retains an almost improvised rhythm, embracing and reflecting Julie’s constant variance through a series of formal stylizations. When she trips on mushrooms, the film playfully spins her fears of aging into a paranoid fantasy. When she’s seized by the impulse to run out on one lover and toward another, Oslo freezes in place so Julie can live out this daydream, sprinting through city streets that have come to a sudden stop.  “The Worst Person in the World” is the third and final entry in what Trier has loosely referred to as his “Oslo trilogy,” a series of meditative, quietly observant melodramas set in Norway’s capital city. Since premiering at Cannes last summer, where Reinsve earned the festival’s award for best actress, the film has been rhapsodically received along the festival circuit, has appeared on many year-end top ten lists (including ours), and just received a four-star review from our own Carlos Aguilar. As Norway’s shortlisted Oscar submission, it’s likely to show up in Best International Feature when nominations are announced next Tuesday.  But first, “The Worst Person in the World” is finally arriving in U.S. theaters, opening in New York and L.A. this Friday before expanding to other cities Feb. 11. To mark the occasion, Trier and Reinsve sat down earlier this week for a wide-ranging conversation about the effervescent potential of romantic comedies, their film’s modern resonance, and the vitality of being present in one’s own life. Co-writer/director Joachim Trier You’ve spoken in previous interviews about George Cukor’s “The Philadelphia Story” and “Holiday” as reference points for this film, as well as more recent movies like “When Harry Met Sally…” and “Notting Hill.” What is the essence of a great romantic comedy? JOACHIM TRIER: That’s a great question that filmmakers have asked themselves for decades. It’s very relevant to this film, because I think we are making a hybrid, for lack of a less technical term. My co-writer, Eskil Vogt, and I had the supporting wheel or guardrails of a genre as we started out. And we thought, “Let’s see if we can allow ourselves to be freer,” because we started thinking about the tropes of romantic comedy, like the ambivalence of choosing a partner and that almost musical aspect. That was liberating and fun. But to your question about what makes a great romantic comedy: I think if you take seriously the pain, the seriousness, and the existential questioning of negotiating close and romantic relationships, the romantic comedy is an opportunity to talk about some of the most important questions in our lives. There are a lot of ways of avoiding yourself in your life and the choices you make. But when you really get close to someone, you get revealed, sooner or later. Who are you? What are your difficulties? What are you searching for? What are your shortcomings? To make stories that talk about that intimate proximity opens up a lot of interesting questions about identity and character. And ultimately, I’m a character-driven storyteller. I think that’s what I look for in romantic stories. RENATE REINSVE: In all comedy, you have to take the tragedy seriously. And with tragedy, in pain, you often have to make it all look like fun on the outside, because it’s too hard to stay in it and be in it otherwise. That’s Julie’s journey, too. She’s not able to settle and rest in situations or in her emotions. She runs away from it all the time. She makes her own fun. She’s destructive. To have fun with that dynamic was, for me, essential.  JT: It’s also interesting to see how different romantic comedies take on different themes. If the romantic comedy’s main premise is to try to talk about how one or several couples find a way to get together or break up or maybe re-engage—as in many of the classic screwball comedies, going out and back in again to have a journey of self-discovery—there are different things that are being dealt with.  If you look at “Holiday,” by George Cukor—which we haven’t talked much about, though we often talk about “The Philadelphia Story”—it’s about the expectations of family and the dysfunctional child trying to find a way to free themselves from the structure of family through love. In the wonderful “Notting Hill