The Worst Person in the World · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman runs across Oslo and the city has stopped. Not slowed. Stopped: hundreds of people caught mid-gesture and holding, which is more or less how Joachim Trier got it, largely in camera, extras standing still while she ran past them. The sequence is euphoric. It is also, if you look at it coldly, a picture of a wish. For once, movement without consequence. Nothing Julie does while the clock is off will cost her anything.

That wish is the film, and it happens to be the cleanest way into a philosopher who died before this movie existed.

Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on cinema in the 1980s, built on one claim. Most movies run on a circuit: a character sees a situation, the situation makes a demand, they act, the action changes the situation. He called that the movement-image, and it's the engine of nearly everything, from Westerns to superhero films. After the war, he argued, that circuit started failing on screen. Characters found themselves in situations no action could resolve, so they watched instead, and we began to feel time as a thing in itself rather than as the ruler you measure a plot with. The time-image.

Julie is not paralysed, and that's what makes her interesting. Deleuze's exemplary postwar figure stands at a window unable to move. Julie moves constantly. She changes fields of study, changes convictions, changes men, and none of it resolves anything, because the situation she is actually in — being twenty-nine, in a comfortable city, with everything permitted — is not the kind of thing an action can close. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image. Trier's addition is to notice that abundance produces the same weightlessness despair does. Having every door open turns out to feel a lot like having none.

The structure knows it. Twelve chapters, a prologue, an epilogue, titles on screen, a narrator hurrying you through four years. Trier and Eskil Vogt took the numbered-episode scaffolding from Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, which anatomised a Scandinavian couple coming apart without ever ruling on them, and the rushing third-person voice from Truffaut's Jules and Jim, where a whole love triangle is compressed by narration that outpaces its people. What that does to time is specific: it hands time to you in parcels instead of as a chain of causes. Deleuze's word for time delivered directly, not as the measure of movement, is chronosign, and the chapter cards are about as literal a one as a widely released film has attempted. One chapter doesn't have to cause the next. It only has to follow it.

Underneath the chapters is a shape Deleuze found everywhere in postwar cinema and called the balade: the trip, the stroll, the journey that transforms nothing. Trier had already built a film on it. Oslo, August 31st pins a man's crisis to a mapped walk through this same city. Worst Person keeps the walk and removes the deadline, which turns out to be more frightening.

Then there is what Julie is doing with herself. Deleuze has a late cluster of ideas he called the powers of the false, and its hero is the forger: not a liar, but someone whose identity is a series rather than a fact, who makes truth instead of reporting it. Cinema's founding contract was that the camera does not lie. The forger films break that contract deliberately, and Deleuze thought the break was creative rather than cynical. Julie forges selves. Renate Reinsve — a near-unknown who had been considering quitting acting, and who left Cannes with Best Actress — plays it inside single gestures, charming and evasive at the same time. And the film declines to punish her for it. The title is a joke about how it feels from the inside to be a person who hasn't settled into one truth yet. Deleuze would call her an artist of her own becoming. Trier simply films her without judgement, which amounts to the same argument.

Now go back to the frozen city. Deleuze noticed that in musicals the dancer stops moving on their own account and is taken up by a movement of the world; the dance carries the dancer. Trier shoots the negative of that. He confiscates the world's movement and gives all of it to one person. Everyone else becomes a posture, an attitude held in place — Deleuze's term is the gest, a stance that exposes a social relation. A whole city of arrested poses, and Julie walks through them like exhibits. It is the funniest scene in the film and the saddest idea in it.

The mushroom sequence comes at the same problem from the other end: a grotesque, tumbling dream anchored to no memory you could date, what Deleuze called an onirosign. Trier holds a register for exactly as long as it works and then drops it, which is Truffaut's whiplash from play to grief rebuilt for a film about ambivalence.

And then the film quietly hands itself to Anders Danielsen Lie. His comics artist watches his generation's certainties expire and can do nothing about it. Deleuze has a name for that too: the seer, a person reduced to seeing clearly. Danielsen Lie has now played Trier's seer three times across the Oslo films, and when the comedy goes still around him, the chapters and the narration and the frozen streets stop being clever and start being about mortality.

So what did the film do? It took a structure everyone files as literary — Annie Hall's titled, non-chronological dissection of a romance; Reprise's omniscient voice and its what-if branchings, folded here into chapters — and used it to smuggle a genuine time-image into a romantic comedy people actually went to see. The freeze itself descends from The 400 Blows, where the frame stops on a running boy as punctuation aimed at the audience. Trier extends that punctuation mark into an entire scene and gives it to the character instead. Antoine's freeze traps him. Julie's sets her loose, briefly. That inversion is the invention.

The question the film leaves open is whether the run through the stopped city is a fantasy Julie is having, or an accurate picture of what those four years feel like from the inside. Watch it again and pay attention to the chapter breaks. Notice how many chapters end without anything being decided, and how the next one simply begins.