When The Worst Person in the World premiered in competition in Cannes this year there was the sense of an arrival, notably in the case of its leading lady, Renate Reinsve, who won the festival’s award for best actress.
In actual fact, the film was closer to a destination, being the third part of an unofficial triptych begun by Norwegian director Joachim Trier with his 2006 feature debut Reprise, about two young bohemian writers living in Oslo.
He followed it in 2011 with Oslo, August 31st, in which Reprise’s star, Anders Danielsen Lie, by day a successful medical doctor, played a melancholic drug addict and Reinsve made her acting debut with just one line of dialogue (“Let’s go to the party!”).While the two films do not necessarily follow on, they each evoke a time and a place, which struck Trier when he and his co-writer Eskil Vogt began fleshing out the concept for The Worst Person … in which Reinsve plays a young woman whose career and love life aren’t exactly going to plan. “Oslo, August 31 was made 11 years ago this year,” Trier reflects, “so I think that returning to that world and the setting of those two first films—now that I’m older and more experienced—was kind of a good, liberating feeling, like a sigh of relief.
I thought, ‘Jesus, I know this world. I want to go back to the streets of Oslo and shoot in those areas of town and see how they’ve developed.’ I also wanted to be with Anders again—my friend Anders, who’s gone on his own journey for the last 10 years—and pick up with him.
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