There is a fallacy of youthful restlessness that’s easy to forget when it’s mostly in the rearview mirror: It’s possible to both not know what you want while also being pretty sure of what you don’t. Becoming who you are isn’t some coherent, linear path with a definitive ending that comes in the form of finding the right person or the right job, getting married or having a baby, no matter what romantic comedies would like you to believe. It’s a chaotic and messy process of elimination with casualties big and small.
At 29 going on 30, Julie, the woman at the heart of Joachim Trier’s “ The Worst Person in the World,” is in the thick of this unrest though neither she nor we know this when we get our first glimpse of her smoking in a black slip dress alone at the edge of a party. Played by the beguiling Renate Reinsve, Julie is the picture of cool glamour, her hair tied back in a casually elegant ponytail. It almost looks like the end to something. We’ll soon come to find that it is, but not in any way we’ve been conditioned to expect. This moment actually happens relatively early in the film, which is playfully structed in 12 chapters with a prologue and epilogue.
