To celebrate the theatrical release of The Worst Person in the World, the acclaimed Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s look at the messiness of modern romance, we bring you his “Oslo Trilogy” in all its decade-spanning glory.
The first film in his accidental trilogy, Reprise (2006) is a visceral and punk-inflected look at the friendship between two young men who aspire to be important writers. Tinged with a bruised melancholy, the masterful existential drama Oslo, August 31st (2011) chronicles 24 hours in the life of a burned-out recovering drug addict as he reels and cavorts his way through the city whilst on an overnight trip from rehab. This loose literary adaptation of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Will O’ the Wisp also stars one of Trier’s favorite actors (and a superstar doctor), Anders Danielsen Lie, the trilogy’s star, who reappears as the faded comic book artist and love interest of Julie in The Worst Person in the World. Already adored, Trier’s international hit expands on the questions of personal and artistic purpose and self-doubt that permeate the trilogy. Here, though, we see through the eyes of a twenty-something urban millennial woman, played with free-spirited abandon by the award-winning actor Renate Reinsve. The three films in Trier’s trilogy are as much documents of a city in flux as they are portraits of people questioning their role in life and what place self-expression might play in it. The unstoppable onslaught of time, another common theme, is also experienced by viewers through its impact on the changing face of a modernizing Oslo throughout the last 15 years of the trilogy’s making. Trier’s moving, melancholic films reflect on what it means to fulfill or to fail to live up to one’s promise. Meanwhile, time marches on.