The Worst Person in the World is the sweetest

The Worst Person in the World is a dramedy directed with brilliance and extreme sensitivity by the Norwegian Joachim Trier. In the opening scene, Julie (Renate Reinsve) smokes and fingers her cell phone at an anticipated time in Chapter 2 (there are 12 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue). As in most of the movie, the protagonist is out of place. "I feel like a spectator of my own life," she says.

After studying - and then becoming uninterested - in Medicine, Psychology and Photography, Julie becomes a bookstore clerk. At the age of thirty, all the expectations of youth suddenly turn into relentless imperatives of adult life: having a fixed job, children, stable relationship among other standards of the status quo.

In this sea of uncertainty (is there any absolute certainty?), she meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a famous cartoonist who created a politically incorrect character. Ten years older than Julie, he soon proposes that the two not be together because their life priorities will always be mismatched. She agrees to leave, and he falls in love.

The couple stays together. Aksel proves to be a good enough, understanding and fun partner, but there is something in the relationship that doesn't work, not for what they do, but for what they both are. This fact sometimes leaves Julie on the fringes of what happens, and she has enough courage to be ravishingly reckless and abandon the situation in search of personal happiness, which she doubts.

In one of those moments when Julie is "out of context" (that initial scene), she walks through the streets and, entering a wedding party where she does not know anyone, meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). With the commitment not to betray their partners, they go beyond the moment's passion in a hilarious ritual of "allowed" intimacies.

The chapters follow each other as a sometimes chaotic set of beginnings and endings, small victories and unexpected tragedies that, like any human life, is full of disappointments for the plans that, inevitably, are never fulfilled.