The Life That Carries Us
The Life That Carries Us
The Life That Carries Us
In Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Julie does not seem like the worst person in the world. This matters because the title prepares us for a moral judgment the film never quite gives. It does not ask us to condemn her. It asks us to watch her move through a life that will not hold still long enough to become clear.
At the beginning she is still becoming someone. She studies medicine, then psychology, then photography. She tries on forms of seriousness. Each choice seems plausible while she is inside it, and then slightly false once she has moved beyond it. The film does not treat this as a defect of character. It treats it as a condition. There is an age, and perhaps there is more than one age, when life seems to ask for a decision before the self has arrived to make it.
Julie is not empty. She is not stupid. She is not cruel in any simple way. She is alive to the pressure of possible lives. She can feel the outline of a future before she has chosen whether she wants it. This is what gives the film its tension. It is not only about indecision. It is about the difficulty of knowing whether a life is truly yours, or whether you are simply walking into the version of yourself that has been prepared for you by habit, romance, culture, age, and the expectations of other people.
That is the word that keeps returning: script. Julie is trying to live one. She does not always know it. She moves from one version of life to another, and each version seems to offer a shape. Become a doctor. Become a psychologist. Become a photographer. Become the young woman with the older, serious man. Become the woman who settles down, has children, makes the next right decision. None of these scripts are absurd. That is why they are so hard to resist. They look like ordinary life.
The pressure of a script is not that it is false from the beginning. It often contains truth. Medicine may have been a real interest. Psychology may have been a real thought. Photography may have been a real opening. Aksel may have been a real love. The problem is not that these lives are fake. The problem is that Julie cannot tell where her own desire ends and where the borrowed shape begins. She wants to live, but she also wants to recognise herself while living.
Aksel gives one version of that life. He is older, established, articulate, known. He has made things. He has opinions. He belongs to a cultural world of books, comics, interviews, apartments, taste, reputation. He has a settled density around him. Julie is drawn to him partly because he has shape. He knows what he has done and what he values. He can place himself in the world.
But that same shape begins to press on her. With Aksel comes the possibility of a future already arranged: a home, work, seriousness, perhaps children, perhaps a kind of adulthood she has not yet decided to enter. None of this is monstrous. The film understands that the expectations that govern us are often reasonable. They do not arrive as violence. They arrive as care, affection, stability, shared routines, and the next right thing.
Julie feels this and pulls away. The film is merciful because it does not make her freedom pure. Her refusal has its own evasions. She leaves too late. She wounds people. She mistakes intensity for clarity. She wants a life that feels chosen, but she often discovers what she wants only after she has stepped out of something. She is not a bad person. She is a person trying to be honest before she fully understands what honesty will cost.
This is why the famous time-freezing sequence works so well. Julie runs through Oslo while the city pauses around her. People are stopped mid-gesture, mid-conversation, mid-life. She moves through them toward Eivind, toward another possible world, another beginning. It is beautiful because it gives form to desire. For a few minutes, consequence has been suspended. Time belongs to her.
But the scene is also dangerous. It shows the fantasy of interruption. Everyone else stops so that the self can continue. Desire feels like freedom because it has not yet had to live with what it has changed. Time, of course, will begin again. The city will move. The people she has left will return to themselves. A choice that felt like escape will become another room, another set of habits, another life that must be lived after the brightness of the decision has passed.
Eivind appears, at first, as the lighter life. He is less formed than Aksel, less burdened by seriousness, less surrounded by the furniture of an established self. With him, Julie can feel young again, or not even young, but unclaimed. The relationship seems to offer a release from the expectations that had begun to gather around her. But Trier is too exact a filmmaker to leave it there. Lightness is not the same as freedom. It can also become a drift. It can become another way of avoiding the question of what one’s life is for.
The film’s deeper movement is that everyone is being carried by something. Julie is carried by possibility. Aksel is carried by commitment, work, identity, and the cultural world that formed him. Eivind is carried by ease, by the refusal to press too hard on anything. No one stands outside the current. No one makes a life from a place of complete freedom.
This becomes clearest when Aksel gets sick. His illness does not simply make him tragic. It makes him lucid. The illness strips away some of the performance of identity. It forces him to look back at his life and see that what once seemed deliberate was also, in part, something he had gone along with. He made choices, yes. He made work, had relationships, took positions, became someone. But he also moved with the current of his time, his talent, his habits, his fears, his pleasures, his need to be recognised.
This is one of the film’s hardest recognitions. We like to imagine that a life is built. There is truth in that. But a life is also accumulated. We enter rooms, accept invitations, stay too long, become good at something, repeat ourselves, form tastes, defend them, and one day discover that the provisional has become permanent. We think we are choosing a life, but often we are also continuing one.
Aksel seems stable because his script has already hardened into character. He knows the language of his world. He knows how to speak in interviews. He knows what he thinks about art, youth, culture, political correctness, ageing, desire. He has opinions because he has lived long enough inside a structure that rewards having them. Julie, by contrast, is still moving through rooms where she does not yet know what to say. This makes her seem unstable. But the film’s later intelligence is to show that stability may only be a script that has lasted long enough to look like truth.
This does not make Aksel false. It makes him human. He did not merely pretend to be himself. He became himself by repetition, by work, by love, by accident, by the river of days. The self is not always a secret essence waiting to be discovered. Sometimes it is what remains after years of going along with something. A person becomes the shape that life keeps asking them to take.
That is why his illness is so moving. It comes after the script has done its work. It arrives when he can no longer revise the whole thing. The rooms, the books, the drawings, the cultural battles, the relationships, the public self, the private habits — all of it is there. All of it has happened. And now he can see that he was not only the author of this life. He was also carried by it.
There is no cheap regret in this. Aksel does not simply say that his life was wasted. That would be easier. He has loved, worked, desired, argued, made art, and lived inside the materials available to him. The pain is more exact. He sees that a life can be real and still be scripted. It can be chosen and still be inherited. It can be deeply yours and still shaped by the river you happened to enter.
This is where the film becomes larger than Julie’s indecision. Julie fears being swept into a life that is not hers. Aksel, near the end, realises that he too was swept along. They stand at different points in the same current. She is afraid of becoming fixed too soon. He is looking back at the fixed form and seeing how much movement, accident, and compliance went into it.
That recognition gives the film its adult sorrow. The question is not whether one should settle or remain free. The question is whether anyone can live without being carried by some form. The open life has a script too. Reinvention has a script. Escape has a script. So does seriousness. So does marriage. So does art. So does refusing marriage and art and seriousness. There is no pure place outside the river.
Julie, who has spent so much of the film resisting settled momentum, slowly sees the other side. To refuse the current is not to escape time. It is to enter another current. Delay also carries a person. So does possibility. So does the need to keep life open. So does the fear of becoming someone too soon. The film does not punish her for wanting her own world, but it does not pretend that wanting one is simple.
That is what makes the ending feel so right. Julie is not delivered into a final certainty. She is not redeemed by a perfect relationship, motherhood, artistic success, or a speech about self-knowledge. She is working. She is behind the camera. She is looking. This matters because the camera gives her a relation to the world that is neither escape nor surrender. She does not have to possess the whole of life in order to attend to a part of it.
There is a quiet discipline in that ending. Julie has not solved herself. But perhaps she has stopped asking life to arrive as a finished identity. She is closer to a practice, and a practice may be more durable than a revelation. A practice gives the day a form. It lets a person meet the world through attention rather than through constant self-explanation.
Behind the camera, Julie is not free in some absolute sense. No one is. She is still inside time, labour, memory, the consequences of what has happened. But she is no longer only being pulled by the available scripts. She has found, at least for now, a way to look. That is not a solution to life, but it is a relation to it. It gives her something to do with the world other than flee it or submit to it.
The film’s title remains with us because it is wrong in the way people’s private accusations are often wrong. Julie is not the worst person in the world. She is not even unusually bad. She is ordinary in a painful way. She wants to be decent and free. She wants not to hurt people and also not to disappear into the life they want with her. She wants the world to feel like hers, but she does not always know how to choose without leaving damage behind.
That may be the film’s most honest thought. We do not only hurt people through malice. We hurt them through confusion, timing, fear, desire, and the need to keep faith with a self we cannot yet describe. We go along with life until we cannot. We leave. We stay. We mistake the current for choice, and choice for the current. Then time passes, and we see that both were true.
Aksel’s late clarity deepens this. He shows us that even the people who seem to have chosen well may later discover the force of the script. The settled life is not necessarily a lie, but neither is it pure authorship. It is made of decisions, but also of atmosphere, history, age, class, taste, friendship, work, fear, and the need to keep moving. We become ourselves partly through intention and partly through surrender.
The Worst Person in the World is not a film about finding yourself. That would be too clean. It is a film about the difficulty of living before the self has become stable, and about the later discovery that even a stable self may have been carried along all the while. It understands that adulthood is not the end of drifting. It is often the moment when drifting acquires furniture, work, reputation, love, and a name.
Julie’s grace is not that she becomes good. She was never simply bad. Her grace is that she begins to look more directly. At herself, at others, at the lives she did not live, at the life still forming around her. Aksel’s grace is different. He begins to see the life he did live, not as a monument to his own certainty, but as something made inside time.
The film leaves Julie there: not triumphant, not condemned, but awake in a quieter way. Not outside the current. No one is outside it. But perhaps, for the first time, able to feel the water moving.