I watched this on the 14th of August, 2024, travelling back from London after my 23rd birthday.
Exquisite and flawed. The performances were all masterful, and while I was apprehensive about the runtime (12 ‘chapters’ plus prologue and epilogue), it didn’t drag.
It was a portrait of four years in the life of a young woman in Oslo, who seems to be perpetually dissatisfied and flaky: she switches from medicine to psychology to photography to writing, while in the first scene she meets a man at a party, before meeting another, spending a few years with him, switching to another, almost having a baby with him, and finally returning to photography.
Okay that summary seems to portray it negatively. The art of the film is in its depictions of each of these phases and the wrenchingly good portrayals of her relationships with her family, her partners, and her friends. The conversations are naturalistic and carry barges of nuance and history, the long close-ups, the lack of fast cuts, all of it entwines together to give something that is neither romantic nor comedic nor bildungsroman but something in between all of them.
Near the end of the film, the main character, Julia, who has been shown to be ambivalent about kids, becomes pregnant. She finds out that her first partner, who was seventeen years older than her, whom she left because they wanted different things and she felt stifled (in a brutal breakup scene), has terminal pancreatic cancer, and goes to visit him and to chat and reminisce. After a few days, he dies, and she spends the night on a park bench, waiting for the sunrise. As she sees it, she cries, and becomes content with having the baby, and building her life with her current partner. A few days later, in a blackly comedic scene, she miscarries in the shower, and leaves him.
The few months where she was with her first partner, but met someone else, who would become her second partner, were also rendered gorgeously: the first night they meet at a party she crashes, where they push closer and closer to the line that would be considered cheating (being close? sharing a drink? telling each other secrets? smelling each other? peeing in front of each other?), to a wonderful scene where she flips a light switch as her first partner is giving her coffee, causing the entire world to halt, whereupon she runs to the second person and spends a golden nychthemeron with him. When she gets back, she breaks up with the first person.
In fact, there were countless really lovely scenes, not because of the actions of the characters or any particularly brilliant cinematography (although it was consistently great throughout), but because of the sharp and nuanced portrayals and writing, in the vein of PTerry, showing a deep love and affection for people.
Who is the worst person in the world? Not Julia, she’s just flighty and flaky and magnetically pretty and charismatic. Neither the first partner, a comic writer (who suffers a cancellable radio interview in the second half about his edgier early work), who is shown to be genuinely kind, if a little sharp-edged and sometimes a bit boring, nor the second character, who, although he cheats on his partner with Julia, is also shown to be just a normal guy. Not their families or friends either (I get the sense throughout this movie that no-one was intended to be an NPC or a side character. Sonder everywhere). Perhaps it’s a comment that everyone thinks they or others are the worst people in the world, while they are all perfectly everyday? It would sound like a cop-out of an answer if the movie wasn’t done so well.