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Answer to the Blog’s first theme: Film & prompt, “The best film I’ve ever watched”

Thank you to Rebeca, who submitted a brilliant response!

You can find Rebeca on Instagram – @rebecaravara

The Film Chosen – The Worst Person In The World

I’ve been asked this question a lot, and I give the same answer every time. At this point, it feels mechanical — almost like I’ve been preparing my whole life to be asked by Letterboxd what my top 4 are. The answer, since 2021, has been Joachim Trier’s *The Worst Person in the World*. The automatic response sometimes makes me feel like I have shed some agency for the sake of repetition: for the sake of having an answer to give. And yet, upon further thought about the characters, the shots, the story itself, I am once more under the film’s grasp. I watched this movie by myself. Just off the deep end of COVID, things were starting to become normal again. Only I didn’t exactly feel normal. I was about to graduate high school, becoming increasingly agoraphobic, and progressively afraid of what my future would look like. My parents decided to take the whole family out to watch a movie. God, I can’t even remember what they wanted to watch, but they insisted on seeing that specific movie. For the life of me I can’t remember what movie that was, I just vividly remember being so hell-bent on seeing whatever they *weren’t*. Maybe out of teenage angst, maybe out of pure curiosity or a need to get some room to breathe, I picked out this film. None of the rest of my family wanted to see it, and as much as that scared me because that meant I was going to be lonely, it may be that some part of me wanted to have that experience by myself. To prove, to myself, that I could do it. Mind you, I make a point to avoid trailers. These days I feel like the whole story is told! Thus I just read the blurb and decided on it. And so, I sat. There were about 4 other people in the theatre, a young couple and two elderly ladies sat by the front. We were all sat metres away from each other. There was something comforting about knowing that I could leave at any point if I needed to. The film started, and, to my surprise, it was an episodic film! The film itself is divided into 12 distinct chapters separated through intertitles (a wonderful change from unnecessarily long blockbusters!), that set a nice and engaging flow to the film. We begin the story following 29-year-old Julie. We are told she doesn’t really know what she’s doing, who she’s dating, or how she wants to live her life. Ignoring the decade-long age gap, I could feel myself getting cosier in my seat: I was in for a treat. That’s essentially it for the story. In the interest of not spoiling the film, that’s kind of all you need to know. Julie exists in a liminal space; sort of dissociated, she flows through events, people, and temporalities as she comes to terms with who she is and what she desires. Her navigation isn’t always precise (lord knows I can hardly agree with some of the decisions she makes), but there’s something so inherently human within those parameters. Her ability to be so profoundly herself, even without any grasp on who that core soul consists of, brought such an incredible validation along with it. A reminder that as audience members we don’t need to be explicitly told who is good and who is evil, that not everyone has their shit figured out, that not all stories are linear. Julie fucks up. Bad. Over and over again. But that’s not to say she isn’t honest. She admits her mistakes, she goes back on things she once abandoned, she devotedly **tries**. Her attitude towards it all reminded me that — certainly under the privilege of a good sum of money — one is free to try. Needless to say, I cried. I cried at multiple points throughout the film, actually, but I especially cried at the end of it. I needed to sit for a while after that. For these kinds of films (those that admittedly don’t appear to have a concrete purpose of sorts) it’s hard to pin down how it does or doesn’t work. I think that, for me, it would come down to the pure humanity within it. Julie is at once a collective of every woman trying to find their way through life just as much as she is her own person. There’s something mystically wonderful about that.