Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy” – Reprise (2006), Oslo, 31 August (2011) and The Worst Person in the World (2021) – wants to ask the big questions: What is a creative life, an intellectual life? What in art is authentic? Are the pursuit of art and the pursuit of love alike – full of suffering, frustration and disappointment? Is it possible to become an adult and to sustain an adolescent level of obsession with books, films and records? Is it possible to be a bit more sensible as an adult – fewer hangovers, less heartbreak when meeting girls and heroes – without becoming bourgeois? Above all, the trilogy is interested in the struggle to balance an intensity of feeling with the matter of everyday life. It begins with Reprise, a cinematic Künstlerroman in which two young men, Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie) and Erik (Espen Klouman Høiner), aspire to be writers of serious literature, and it continues with Oslo, 31 August, a literary adaptation focused on a day, a long night and morning after in the life of a thirty-four-year-old man, Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), temporarily out from an alcohol and drug rehabilitation centre to interview for a role as editorial assistant at a publishing house. The trilogy finishes with The Worst Person in the World, an already beloved romantic comedy, reviewed warmly at its Cannes premiere and now nominated for two Oscars (Best International Feature Film and Best Original Screenplay). Ostensibly influenced by George Cukor and Eric Rohmer, the film is to my mind more reminiscent of Sundance fare like 500 Days of Summer and Netflix’s Master of None. While it is the first film in the Oslo trilogy to centre the existential wandering not of a young man but of a young woman, The Worst Person is also the safest of the three. With Julie (Renate Reinsve), the trilogy finally grows up and gives up – not only on an intensity of feeling but also on the other stuff of life.
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For the young men of Reprise, living with great books, great films and great records is incompatible with living with girls. Girls can only recommend books on secondary school syllabi, are able barely to engage with “anything slightly outside of the mainstream”, and use up emotions that are to be committed, ideally, to art, literature and music. Such a division – girls on one hand, art on the other – is figured and figured out through the divergent fates of Phillip and Erik. By the end of the film, both are published writers of serious literature. But while Phillip is disillusioned with it, fixated instead on an ex-girlfriend and immured in a psychiatric ward, Erik is the single and sane author of Prosopopoeia, a cerebral novel misunderstood on chat shows and in newspaper reviews yet praised, more importantly, by Sten Egil Dahl, a fictional contemporary of Maurice Blanchot. You can’t have the girl and pen the next Great Norwegian Novel, too.
Reprise
Erik’s bookshelves lined with Blanchot, Derrida and Duras eclipse Julie’s books glimpsed at the beginning of The Worst Person, not because her Didion, Ditlevsen and Woolf cannot compare in intellectual value to his Blanchot, Derrida and Duras, but because this francophilic canon of critical theory and nouveaux romans is meaningful to the character of Eric, while Julie’s literary inclinations are incidental, her character all surface. Julie is introduced in the montage that precedes the film’s 12 chapters as a twenty-something woman coasting from calling to calling, from passion to passion. Here, the third person voice-over of an anonymous woman renders Julie both relatable and a little risible as she undergoes a trite series of “realising things”, echoed by changes in hair style and colouring. (The voice-over recalls the third person voice-over in the opening montage of Reprise, also affectionate and ironising towards events in the lives of Phillip and Erik.) Julie decides against studying medicine and against studying psychology; instead, she works part-time in a bookshop while dabbling in photography and men. Soon she falls into bed with Aksel (who else but Anders Danielsen Lie), the creator of a comic about a flatulent fuckboy cat. Aksel warns Julie they will “fall into a vicious circle” if they couple up. The two fall in love. So the rollercoaster opening montage closes with images of Julie moving into Aksel’s flat, unpacking Didion, Ditlevsen and Woolf onto Aksel’s bookshelves. These books are swiftly forgotten, however. In the first of the film’s chapters, during a dinner sequence in which Aksel’s friends talk about male masturbation, dwindling sperm counts, and reference Portnoy’s Complaint, Julie bemoans a lack of books about women’s bodies and desires. The film is seemingly unsure, then, whether she has read such books or heard of such books, which were right in front of her nose not so long ago. As such, the film zigzags between signifiers without caring too much about them and without having Julie care too much about them either. Is it that Trier and his co-writer throughout the trilogy, Eskil Vogt, know too little about young women to know what women’s essays, memoirs and novels might mean to us? Or is the thin characterisation of Julie more insidious: an indictment of us as shallow, buying books we think we should read, without ever opening them?
Only superficially a reader, Julie is also only superficially a writer, too: all she has to her name is a binned attempt at fiction described by a boyfriend as autobiography and one thinkpiece of the ilk dismissed by Anders in Oslo, 31 August. (Interviewing with a magazine, Anders wryly advises it avoid publishing articles he thinks of as ‘Samantha in Sex in the City seen through Schopenhauer’.) Nonetheless, according to the sporadic voice-over in The Worst Person, Julie’s ‘Oral Sex in the Time of #MeToo’ “sparks lively debate on Facebook”, just as Erik’s Prosopopoeia, according to the third-person voice-over in Reprise “sparks lively debate”. While this is certainly intended as a comment on the changing shape of the public sphere – from serious literature to sex and politics, from newspapers and magazines to Facebook – more interesting, surely, is the discrepancy between the kind of voice Trier and Vogt allow Erik and what kind of voice they allow Julie. In both Reprise and The Worst Person, the voice-over eventually dissolves. Its dissolution in Reprise makes space for Erik to narrate the closing montage of the film: in the future conditional tense, Erik imagines Phillip, his now ailing friend, to be sitting and talking outside a café, not in a hospital but in the world. Dissolution of the voice-over in The Worst Person, however, makes space not for Julie to write, narrate or dream, but for Aksel to rant and lament. The writer of serious literature is permitted the lofty, literary space of the voice-over; the feminist of one thinkpiece is not.
For the last four chapters of the film, the voice of Aksel comes to the fore. Julie is running on a treadmill when she coincidentally sees Aksel (now her ex-boyfriend) on the gym’s television, protecting art against “post-feminist” political correctness on a chat show with two women: two women written, conveniently, to do little to no justice to the complexities of debate around “transgressive” art in the wake of the #MeToo movement. In any case, as the reclusive Sten Egil Dahl tells us in Reprise, a chat show is no place to discuss art and literature. If Aksel loses the battle of the show, a man cancelled for being on the wrong side of contemporary discourse, then he wins the war for art and literature. He leaves the realm of the talk show, Julie’s realm of thinkpieces, as someone who is better than it, too clever for it: misunderstood. Later, in hospital for cancer treatment, Aksel mourns the end of books, films and records as things to hold and to live with. And as Aksel mourns, so too does the film mourn Aksel as the dying voice of art. By ending these last chapters of The Worst Person with Aksel, Trier and Vogt frame the Oslo trilogy firmly as their equivalent to Linklater’s Boyhood or Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, with Phillip-Anders-Aksel as the man who gradually gives up on art and tragically bows out from the world. All in all, the trilogy is a story of men: the last-minute shift in focus to Julie is fleeting and false.
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In the epilogue of Reprise, Erik dreams of the friend with whom he once shared aspirations, interests and jokes, discussions both meaningful and less meaningful, bottles of beer on waterfronts, heads light from the heat and backs warmed by the sun, hoarse throats after ecstatic nights of shouting along to Le Tigre in louder, happier times, before Phillip withdrew from the world. In the prologue of Oslo, 31 August, a chorus of voices on the soundtrack memorialise a series of images on-screen of the Norwegian capital from the 1970s and the 1980s. Julie has no such memories of friends and no such memories of community. In the prologue of The Worst Person, among the luminous fragments of blissful cohabitation, Julie mentions one woman: “She’s been a bit frosty towards me. That’s new. We were single together, then suddenly I move in with you…” Who is this newly frosty woman with whom Julie experienced single life? For the rest of the film, Julie drinks and dances with the friends of one boyfriend, trips with the friends of another, but never socialises with friends of her own. Perhaps Julie is simply one of those women who claim other women don’t like her, one of the boys. (“I always think Tone doesn’t like me,” she whispers to Aksel at the beginning of a weekend with his friends and their wives.) Come the epilogue of the film, though, Julie has no social life of which to speak at all: no boyfriends and no girlfriends to be seen.
In the epilogue, Julie is working as a unit photographer, her hair cut into a bob to tell us, without any affectionate or ironising commentary from an anonymous voice-over this time, that she is an adult with an actual job, at last. Julie takes photographs of the actress on set. Then, as she packs up her equipment by a window, she catches sight of an ex-boyfriend, Eivind, with a baby, come to greet the actress as she leaves work. He kisses her and the family walks away together. Behind a window and not in the world, Julie is little more than an observer of life, as motionless as the stills she takes for a living. Going through life as an observer rather than as a participant is not something to judge or to dismiss at an individual level – but that the film ends with the woman protagonist of the trilogy so isolated is something about which we should, I think, be suspect, in light of the widespread affection for Julie as the next Young Millennial Woman.[1] Indeed, I don’t know why we – we young women film critics, we young feminist film critics – are not more wary of this film, this film which finishes on a note of contentment at the image of a thirty-something woman without friends or interests coming home from work to do more work at her desk.[2] She might, unlike Aksel-Anders-Phillip, be healthy. She might be fulfilled at work. She might be independent, defined neither as girlfriend nor as mother. But The Worst Person offers us no hint as to Julie’s inner life and no clue whatsoever as to the possibilities of Julie’s social life without father, Aksel, Eivind or child. At peace and independent is all she seems to be. Trier and Vogt cannot imagine what comes after feminism’s gains, and so Julie remains pure surface. Where is that woman from those nights of single adventures, before Aksel? Did the glimpse of Eivind leave Julie pensive, if not regretful and not nostalgic, on the walk home from work? Did she dwell on the autumnal colours of the city? Did she detour absent-mindedly to a bar, a cinema or a museum? Do we stop dreaming when we find work which works for us, or is this when dreaming can really get going? As a unit photographer, Julie escapes the medical career path assigned to young women in the Oslo trilogy (a psychologist in training here, a nutritionist in training there) and the madness of the artist. Julie manages to evade the normative formation of the couple, of the family unit, but only to become a unit of one – not one of the people or part of the variable, limitless formation of the crowd.
But this is where we live our lives. Writing about Oslo, 31 August, Karl Ove Knausgaard (with whom Trier and Vogt collaborated in 2018 on a documentary about Edvard Munch) describes how “it begins in the collective, with memories we all have, while the rest of the film is about a rejection of community, of others”.[3] Before Phillip, Julie and Aksel reject the world, Reprise and The Worst Person also begin with memories we all have: memories of youthful ambition, folly and fun (Trier is nothing if not a director of fun). For Knausgaard, Anders – much like Aksel, Erik and Phillip, and Karl Ove in the My Struggle books (2009-11) – “sees through everything, everything that goes on around him is just empty talk, rubbish, banalities, and that’s how it is, social life is just empty talk, rubbish, banality, and yet that’s where we live our lives”.[4] At best – in Oslo, 31 August, in particular – the Oslo trilogy denounces a conformity seemingly typical of Norwegian society while simultaneously, crucially, recognising empty talk, rubbish, banality as where we live our lives.
Oslo, 31 August
With one eye to the image of Anders high again and alone at the end of Oslo, 31 August, Knausgaard observes how “[turning] one’s back on social life, or [being] unable to take it in, can be fatal”.[5] So The Worst Person commits Julie not to addiction and illness, but to the fatality that is an absence of social life – and without the thin silver lining of a difficult, vibrant high. Julie withdraws from the world not in the pursuit of art, drugs or love but in the name of what the film thinks is feminism: a room of one’s own in which to click, click, photoshop away. Anders is high again and alone at the end of Oslo, 31 August, but is permitted, at least, beauty, as he plays Handel’s Sarabande on piano. With neither the beauty of art nor the vitality of the crowd, only some work to get on with, Julie is left barely a person in the world (never mind the worst one). With misguided satisfaction – a sort of sigh of relief at having ticked the box of ‘woman protagonist’ without having left her either shacked up or fucked up – the film recedes as Julie sits at her computer, every bit the modern woman, her independence no more than apolitical isolation and the grounds for late capitalist productivity. As Mal Ahern and Moira Weigel write, feminists should be critical of a supposedly liberatory choice either of the Man-Child (Julie for most of the film) or of the Grown Woman (Julie in the epilogue): “We cannot finally embrace the Man-Child,” they write, “nor can we step into the Grown Woman role late capitalism has devised for us.”[6] In the final third of the Oslo trilogy, a woman enters and takes centre stage only for art, friendship and life to end. The highs of the addicts and the artists of the first two films are abandoned, consigned to the domain of the cancelled man. If we identify with Julie, then we are left fatally separated from art, literature and one another, each alone in a room of our own. Is that what we want?
Laura Staab is a writer and researcher based in London
[1] See Rebecca Liu, ‘The Making of a Millennial Woman’, Another Gaze, 12 June 2019: https://www.anothergaze.com/making-millennial-woman-feminist-capitalist-fleabag-girls-sally-rooney-lena-dunham-unlikeable-female-character-relatable/.
[2] See articles on the film in Little White Lies, Reverse Shot and W. I am glad for Beatrice Loayza’s and Michelle Orange’s more circumspect reviews of the film in Cinema Scope and 4 Columns, meaning I need not look only to reliably grumpy older men – Richard Brody (the New Yorker) and AS Hamrah (the Baffler) – for criticism of the film.
[3] Karl Ove Knausgaard, So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch [2017], trans. Ingvild Burkey (London: Penguin, 2019).
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] Mal Ahern and Moira Weigel, ‘Further Materials Towards a Theory of the Man-Child’, the New Inquiry, 9 July 2013: https://thenewinquiry.com/further-materials-toward-a-theory-of-the-man-child/.