Julia is almost thirty. She doesn’t know what she wants and she doesn’t know if she is happy at all. Everything always went well for her, so she didn’t even know where to go in life. She tried several fields of study, from medicine and psychology to photography. She changed hairstyles and partners before setting in with a 15-year-old comic book artist, Aksel. With curiosity and at the same time a slight reluctance, she looked into the world of his settled friends, who were proudly commenting on the instability of her generation.
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“You don’t even have time to think today, there’s still something going on on your screens,” one of them tells her. But Julie has plenty of time to think. Especially for thinking about yourself. She is still looking for more in her life, also because Aksel wants to settle down while she doesn’t. He finds the “more” at the party, where he meets his peer Elvind. As he decides, he does not want to reveal himself, but the result is, as usual, bittersweet. And she gets Julia to the point where she’s forced to radically rethink all her thoughts on herself so far. In short – he must finally grow up.
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Partnerships have always been a grateful film theme, just because of how many positive and negative emotions they bring to our lives. However, the feeling of loneliness must be taken into account in the love vicissitudes of the millennials. In the world of Tinder, this may sound paradoxical, but it is the infinite possibilities of man that can often bind him. The worst person in the world tells about the relationships of today’s thirties with charm, understanding and light irony – and that’s the main thing that makes him a hit. And also how the film works at the same time and at the same time. As through a series of unforgettable moments, he creates the impression that his heroes are people like us, living the same everyday life.
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Most of the scenes in the film are told inventively, cleverly and with a joke. The film has several highlights, one of which is a scene where Julie walks through the city in frozen time, passing people stopped, cars and poured coffee cups, but she moves as she is used to. It was as if Julie had been given a chance to escape the flow of fast-flowing youth for a while.
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Transience is an important theme of the film. The transience of time, the transience of the heroes and their youth, friendships, loves and dreams, which are easily changed into new dreams. When Aksel talks at the end of the film that he has been collecting vinyls and books all his life, he logically contrasts this with a time when everything is virtual. Not only music albums, but sometimes relationships themselves. Is it still possible to rely on solid ground under them?
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Joachim Trier’s film is primarily about finding a compromise between how we imagine our lives and what they end up like. We are in love and we should be happy – so why do we often feel like the worst people in the world?
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In the film, Trier subtly works with the audience’s emotions. The actress of his heroine also helps him in this. Renate Reinsve won the Best Actress award from Cannes for her role as Julie, and her character wins the audience on her side even when she is not behaving the best. But we understand her motivation even in these moments and the more we go with this character, where she will lead us.
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In the end, however, the film full of unforgettable scenes turns into a somewhat sentimental melodrama. From a two-hour footage, this is where a somewhat tired viewer might want to cut at least a quarter of an hour. It is these moments, colored by a somewhat intrusive soundtrack, that can sometimes push the film to the edge of kitsch – it would be a shame not to see this great film just because of them. Just because he probably describes the life of his generation very accurately.
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The worst man in the world was named the best foreign language film at the New York Film Critics Awards and has two irons on fire at the Oscars, where he is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. It enters Czech cinemas on March 17.
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