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Rating: I grew up in an era without the internet or cell phones. My world is long gone. For me, shopping was the most important thing. Go to the record store, take the tram, go downtown, browse through all the comics at the flea market. I grew up in a time when culture was passed down through material things, we could surround ourselves with objects, we could take them, hold them, compare them. A bit like books. What I have is what I spent my life for. To accumulate all these experiences, whether it's comics or books. And I continued to collect even when it no longer gave me the strong feelings it did in my early twenties. And yet I continued. And now all I have is nothing more than a heap of completely foolish experiences and memories, things of no importance. Irrelevant.
What will we tell the children we won’t have...
The Worst Person in the World by Joachim Trier, nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film.
Becoming adults between 2010 and 2020
As much as the "generational" label is often overused and misplaced, if there's a recent film that deserves such a definition, it is absolutely this one.
I think the latest film by the Danish director perfectly puts on screen today's thirty-something, within the contemporary and (post)modern world.
The vacuity of a middle generation: the millennials
The indeterminacy, the narcissism, the anxieties regarding contemporaneity; the relational and emotional instability, the eternal dissatisfaction.
The anxiety of living life as a spectator, the vacuity (result of the same vacuous, fluid, and almost intangible postmodernity as above); a desire for lightness and discomfort in facing adulthood. Sometimes externalized with references to childhood icons.
A certain reluctance to face difficulties with a consequent escape from relationships.
Indecision and perennial professional non-achievement, the tendency to procrastinate. In short: a substantial inability to cope with the world.
Portrait of an era
The film surveys fragments of life in this era, including references to metoo, climate change (with a mention of the typical guilt of the average Westerner) and the obsession with political correctness (even more pronounced in the Nordic countries, if possible). Up to the masks in the epilogue.
In some dynamics, it reminded me of something from Baumbach's indie cinema, and indeed a character at least partially comparable to the protagonist might be Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha.
The Worst Person in the World completes the Oslo Trilogy of the director (after Reprise and Oslo, August 31), and after the also notable Thelma, I consider this film another little gem. And Trier is an absolutely interesting author. Capable of also changing tone and genre, yet remaining interested in psychological and social exploration of today's Oslo, and making, indeed, reference to the age of formation.
Highly recommended.
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