The Worst Person in the World and the Crime of Not Knowing Yet

Joachim Trier’s film from 2021, written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, with Renate Reinsve as Julie, is discussed here in full, including what happens in its later chapters. Anybody who would rather meet those chapters first should stop at the end of this paragraph and come back afterwards.

Most of what has been written about the film takes Julie’s indecision as its subject. She moves from medicine to psychology to photography. She moves from an older partner to a younger one. She starts things and puts them down. Read as a sequence of moves, it looks like a description of a personality: restless, unable to settle, not sure what she wants.

This Library reads something else in it. The film’s subject is not one woman’s indecision. It is the quiet moral panic a culture attaches to the state of not knowing yet.

Julie is treated, by the people around her and eventually by herself, as though not having decided were a defect in her character. What she is actually doing is narrower and more defensible than that. She is declining to ratify a life she has not chosen. Those two things look identical from outside, and on the inside they are not remotely the same.

The title states the confusion in four words. The worst person in the world is not a verdict anybody delivers against Julie in the film. It is the verdict she delivers against herself, and its content is not a wrong she has done. Its content is the fact that nothing is settled yet.

Before the film, the ground it stands on is worth naming honestly, because it is ground almost everybody is standing on.

A person of thirty has a job, a partner and a fixed address, and we call that maturity. Another person of thirty has changed subject twice, work three times and relationship twice, and we call that immaturity. What is being compared in those two words is not the quality of anybody’s judgement. It is the degree to which a position has stopped moving.

An earlier essay in this Library argued that the word normal has become a scorecard nobody ever agreed to in a meeting, held in identical copies by people who have never discussed it. Married or not. Permanent contract or not. Children or not. The columns are shared without being spoken, and when a blank cell is spotted the people nearby offer, almost reflexively, to help fill it in. This film is about another column in the same scorecard, and it may be the most punishing one: settled, or not settled.

The trouble with that column is that it does not inspect the contents. A bad marriage still fills the cell. A job that fits nobody still counts as continuity. The scorecard does not read what is inside the box; it reads whether the box is occupied. Which produces a result that ought to be startling and is instead completely ordinary. A person who has made a decision she regrets scores higher than a person who has not made one.

Julie knows the scoring. That is the whole reason she reaches for the phrase in the title. It is not self-knowledge. It is the sound of an external tally that has been swallowed and is now speaking in the first person.

Here is the distinction the film makes in nearly every scene, and it is one that ordinary language does not carry a word for.

There is a person who does not know what she wants. She cannot point in a direction. She cannot name a candidate. What she needs is time, or information, or practice at reading her own interior.

And there is a person who knows that what is being offered is not it. She may not be able to point in a direction either. But about the specific thing in front of her she can say, with accuracy, that this is not the one. That is not ignorance. It is a judgement, and it is often a very good judgement, arrived at faster and more reliably than the positive version would be.

Everyday speech calls both of them indecisive, because there is no second word. And the absence of that second word works against the second woman continuously. A refusal that cannot produce an alternative is indistinguishable, from outside, from having no idea about anything.

What Julie does repeatedly is the second thing. About each life that is held out to her she is quite precise, and she is generally right. What she cannot supply is the replacement. And the people around her use the missing replacement to invalidate the refusal, as though a person were only entitled to decline an offer while holding a better one.

This Library has argued elsewhere that saying it does not matter to me transfers the work of deciding onto the other person. Julie’s difficulty is the mirror image. She can say that this is not it. But until she can say what instead, the first sentence is not received as information at all. It is received as a symptom.

Aksel, played by Anders Danielsen Lie, is a comic artist in his mid forties with work, standing, a circle of friends and a clear view of what he wants the next years to contain, children included.

He is not a villain, and the film is scrupulous about this. He is intelligent, he is candid, he sees Julie accurately, and at one point he predicts the shape of the ending between them with uncomfortable precision. Nothing in the film asks us to think less of him.

And the relationship still has a slope in it. A settled life exerts gravity. The furniture is already placed. The friendships are already formed and already have their evenings. The weekends already have a shape. The question of children has already been answered on one side and is merely pending on the other. The settled party does not have to insist on anything. Existing in that state is sufficient; the unsettled party slides.

From outside that slope reads as maturity. Frequently it is only momentum. Whoever started earlier is setting the speed, and being earlier is not the same as being right.

What makes the slope hard to talk about is that resisting it looks like selfishness. A person who declines to fit into an arrangement that is already built appears ungrateful for the building. A person who questions the arrangement appears to be questioning the people in it. So the reasons for not fitting tend to get swallowed somewhere between being felt and being said, and what surfaces instead is behaviour that looks arbitrary.

The film is careful not to make the second man an escape from this. Eivind, played by Herbert Nordrum, is younger and lighter and appears to be carrying nothing. He has his own settled shape, his own expectations, his own gravity. Moving is not the same as being free of the force. Sometimes only the centre has moved.

The film is built as twelve chapters bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. Each chapter is titled. Chapters end. And across the seam between one and the next, things that the previous chapter appeared to have settled are quietly no longer settled.

This is not decoration, and it is not a novelistic affectation. It is an argument, made in form rather than in speech.

A life told as one continuous arc assumes something. It assumes that later events grow out of earlier ones, that choices accumulate, and that a person gradually becomes the person they were going to be. Under that assumption, changing direction is failure, because it interrupts a growth. A life told in chapters refuses the assumption. There are joins, and the joins are visible, and nothing pretends they can be sewn shut.

The claim that comes out of the form is this. A life is not one arc. It is a series of provisional settlements. Each settlement is correct for the information available and for the person who exists at that moment, and each is subject to revision in the next chapter, and revision is not betrayal.

That claim sits directly on something this Library keeps arriving at from other directions. Terms can be stated in advance; wants cannot. A want is not available for inspection before it has been lived near. The chapter structure converts that into a shape you can watch.

And the titles do a second piece of work. They are attached to events and to weather rather than to stages of inner development. They do not announce that Julie has grown. A chapter of a life is not a rung. It is a division, and the film declines to promise that the divisions are ascending.

In the sequence everybody remembers, Julie touches a light switch and the city stops. People stop. Traffic stops. A stream of coffee stops in the air. She runs through the arrested city to Eivind.

It is usually described as an image of romantic euphoria, and that description is true and incomplete.

This Library reads it as an image of permission.

What Julie obtains in that sequence is not a man. It is a span of time in which the world is not watching. The scorecard is not being updated. Nobody else’s schedule is advancing. No account of herself is owed to anybody, because there is nobody in a position to ask for one. Inside that span she does what she wants without first checking whether she is allowed.

And the decisive detail is that the permission is not granted to her. No one gives it. She reaches out and operates the switch herself. The film spends its single piece of magic on that gesture, which is a way of saying something exact about the world outside the film: there is no such switch. The permission a person needs in order to want something plainly is not issued by anybody. It has to be taken, and taking it is so difficult that a realist film had to break its own physics to show it happening.

The other half of the image is the ending of it. The city starts again. Time resumes and immediately begins charging for what happened inside it. A permission that was taken rather than granted lasts exactly as long as the surrounding world is held still, which is why the film does not let the sequence run on, and why what follows is not a reward.

A useful experiment: keep the sequence of Julie’s actions exactly as it is and change only the gender of the person performing them.

Changed subject. Changed profession. Lived with an established older partner, left, went to somebody else. Wrote something, stopped writing, wrote again. Entered the thirties without having decided about children.

When that sequence belongs to a male character, cinema has a settled vocabulary for it. Searching. Drifting, in the admiring sense. A young man not yet formed, walking around a city, and being unformed is his qualification for the story rather than his disgrace. The type has a long lineage, and Trier’s own earlier films sit inside that lineage rather than outside it. The audience is asked to find the drift interesting, and it does.

When the identical sequence belongs to a woman, the vocabulary changes without anybody voting on the change. Selfish. Careless. Thinking only of herself. And, at the end of the list, the worst.

The film did not invent this asymmetry. What it does is put a title on it. By having the protagonist deliver the verdict against herself, it shows the verdict arriving from outside and then taking up residence, which is a more damaging fact about a culture than any line of dialogue could be.

One caution is required here, and the film requires it too. This is not a claim that nobody in the story is hurt. People are hurt, and a later section takes that seriously rather than defensively. The claim is narrower: that a male character causing the same quantity of hurt would not be called by these words, and that the difference in the words does real work in how the same behaviour is understood.

An earlier essay in this Library separated two wants that ordinary speech runs together. Wanting a partner and wanting intimacy are different hungers. The first is a want for a form: it is externally visible, it has a name, and it can receive social recognition. The second is a want for a state: it is invisible from outside, it has no convenient name, and there is nothing for anybody to congratulate.

Julie’s story takes place exactly where those two are being confused on her behalf. What is held out to her is always the form. Aksel’s life is a completed form, entry is genuinely available, and entry is presented as the correct answer rather than as one option among several.

What she is declining is the form. What she cannot decline is the machinery that converts declining the form into a finding about her character.

And here the scorecard does its second and less noticed piece of work. It demands reasons asymmetrically. A filled cell requires no explanation; an empty one requires explanation repeatedly. Nobody is asked why they married. People are asked, for years, why they have not. Nobody is asked why they stayed in the job. People are asked why they left it.

Julie cannot supply the reasons because the reasons have not become language yet. This is the ordinary condition of anybody in the middle of finding something out. And a reason that has not become language is treated, by everyone waiting for it, as identical to no reason at all. That is the film’s quietest cruelty, and it is administered almost entirely by people who mean well.

In the later part of the film there is a chapter concerned with serious illness. This essay will not walk through it. There is nothing that the argument needs from a detailed account of it, and there is something that a detailed account would take away from the film.

One thing about it belongs here. That chapter withdraws a premise the earlier chapters had all been resting on.

The premise was that there is enough time. Provisional settlements can be revised. They can be revised because there is a next chapter. Every argument this essay has made about revision being permissible depends silently on that supply.

The late chapter introduces the fact that the next chapter is not guaranteed. And the important thing about how the film does it is what it refuses to do with it. It is not arranged as a consequence of Julie’s choices. It is not a bill arriving. It happens on a track that has nothing to do with her indecision, and it is not moralised.

That refusal is where the film declines to become ordinary. A version in which an unsettled woman is made to pay for being unsettled was available, cheap and would have been widely praised. Irreversibility is placed in the film as a property of time rather than as an instrument of judgement, which is both truer and far harder to write.

And afterwards the film still does not let Julie announce which of her choices was correct. The epilogue does not resolve her into a verdict. It shows that the chapters are continuing, which is the only honest thing a film about provisional settlements could show.

There is a direct objection to everything above, and it is not weak.

It runs like this. This essay has read Julie as a person under structural pressure: a scorecard, a slope, an asymmetric vocabulary. But something simpler is also happening on screen. A woman deceives a man who loves her, in a way he does not know about, and then leaves him. She enters another person’s relationship. She goes to see her father and is wounded by what happens there, and even in that scene she is looking at it almost entirely from the side of her own disappointment. She treats people carelessly. That is not an effect of a structure. It is a series of things she chooses to do, one at a time, to specific people who can feel them.

And the objection has a second half, which is sharper. Structural vocabulary can be used as an exemption. If a person who has hurt somebody can rename the hurting as resistance to a culture’s scorecard, then the person on the receiving end has nowhere left to stand. Aksel is not a gravitational field. He is a man. What he received was not a social structure. It was her specific conduct toward him, and describing it in the language of forces removes him from his own experience of it.

Most of that lands. The honest answer is not a rebuttal. It is a separation.

This essay does not claim that Julie hurt nobody. She does. It does not claim that she behaved well. She does not. What it claims is that two distinct judgements are being made and that they should be made separately. The first is a judgement about how she treated particular people in particular scenes, and it can be severe. The second is a judgement about the fact that her life is not fixed in place, and that one is not a moral judgement at all, though it is delivered in moral language.

What actually happens, in the film and around it, is that the two are bundled. A legitimate criticism of how she handled a specific person travels in the same parcel as disapproval of her being unsettled, and once they are travelling together the second begins to look like evidence for the first. The story becomes: she hurt him because she is the kind of person who cannot settle. That inference does not hold. Settled people hurt the people close to them in comparable quantities. The difference is that their hurting is not available for explanation by a standing character flaw, so it gets processed as a series of separate events, which is what it also is in Julie’s case.

And the part of the objection that survives intact should be conceded plainly. Freedom to choose your own life is not freedom from the consequences of how you treat people inside it. Every criticism of Julie that attaches to what she said, what she did not say, and when, is untouched by any argument in this essay. Nothing here is offered in its defence, and it would be dishonest to write a piece about her autonomy that quietly smuggled in an acquittal.

This is a reading of a film. It is not clinical explanation, not guidance, and not therapy, and it diagnoses nobody, on screen or off.

The factual statements rest on published sources, each recorded in this essay’s evidence ledger: that the film is from 2021, directed by Joachim Trier and written by Trier and Eskil Vogt; that Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie and Herbert Nordrum play the principal roles; that it screened In Competition at Cannes in 2021, where Reinsve received the award for Best Actress; that it was nominated at the 94th Academy Awards for Original Screenplay and as Norway’s entry for International Feature Film; and that it is arranged in twelve chapters bookended by a prologue and an epilogue.

The Japanese release title used in the Japanese text is the one published by the film’s Japanese distributor.

Everything this essay reads into those facts is this Library’s interpretation and is not a statement about anybody’s intentions. That includes the central reading of the film as being about the treatment of not knowing yet, the distinction between not knowing and knowing that this is not it, the separation of gravity from momentum, the chapter structure taken as a formal argument, and the frozen-city sequence taken as an image of permission being taken rather than granted. None of it is a claim that the filmmakers meant any of this.

The passage on gendered vocabulary reports an observation that has been widely made in criticism. It is treated here as a cultural signal rather than as a measured finding, and no figure or study is offered for it.

This is not a description of women of any age or of any decade of life. It is a description of one character in one film. Lives that look the same from outside arise from entirely different reasons, and nothing here should be read back onto anybody.

No filmmaker, performer, distributor, festival or institution referred to here knows of this house or endorses it.