Amélie is arguably a film that defined a genre. Described as a “fanciful comedy about a young woman…creating a world exclusively of her own making,” it’s plain to see that things were a lot more hopeful in 2001 (even if 9/11 had only recently kicked off a post-Empire era). Because a similar “aura” permeates Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, yet rather than “comedic” or “fanciful,” Julie (Renate Reinsve) is best characterized as merely “a product of her generation.” Hence, the anxiety, abulia and general unease that she possesses. Yet she still qualifies as a new take on a manic pixie dream girl (or nightmare girl, if you prefer). In point of fact, the waifish aesthetic of Reinsve also mirrors Audrey Tautou’s, particularly in the opening scene when we are exposed to her side profile in a manner that recalls the Tautou of 2006’s Priceless as well.
But where Amélie was allowed the luxury of living in 1997, when everything was undeniably less stressful because the internet hadn’t permeated every facet of existence (just Pam and Tommy’s sex life), Julie is subjected to this hyper-“connected” modern world. Like Amélie, Julie also gets her life narrated, albeit by an unseen woman instead of a man. And often, that woman will say some of the very same lines the characters end up uttering.
One such narration at the beginning includes, “There were too many interruptions, updates, feeds, unsolvable global problems. She sensed a gnawing unease she had tried to suppress by cramming, by drowning it in digital interference.” A digital interference that serves as part and parcel of her indecision about essentially everything, including, first and foremost, a “career path.” Which is honestly the most laughable term in a time when apocalypse feels constantly imminent. And sure, there was the threat of nuclear war all the time back in the mid-twentieth century day, but this is something different. A general apathy and resignation toward going through the motions of capitalism until the all but assured collapse (or rather, a collapse for the broke asses who can’t survive the eugenics of climate change).
Deciding she would be more focused if she switched from her pursuit of a medical degree to a psychology one, she insists to her mother, “My passion has always been what goes on inside—thoughts, feelings.” Since this is only the first time she’s asked permission to make a switch in her studies, Mother is supportive, encouraging, “If psychology will make you happy, then do it.” But there’s that dangerous word—“happy.” The one that sets so many people up for misery in the end when they realize it’s an ephemeral feeling that can never be “permanently obtained.” The dissatisfaction will always invariably sink in. Especially for someone of Julie’s generation, who has been made to believe their whole lives that instant gratification should lead to at least some form of satisfaction. Alas, it seems the more choice and the more subjection to the information-action ratio, the more we become like Pavlov’s learned helplessness dog, cowering into a corner and just lying down because it’s all too much and no one is ever ultimately rewarded for their hard work.
At this early stage of the movie (“A film in twelve chapters, a prologue and an epilogue”), Julie has long blonde hair and is looking especially Nordic. But with the switch to a new major comes the dumping of her current boyfriend and the reinvention of her hair, now cut short and rosé-toned as she walks confidently into the classroom. But, once again, the ennui sets in. The feeling that this pursuit just can’t be right. Shouldn’t she feel it if it were?
Looking around at her classmates, our narrator states, “She observed her fellow students. Norway’s future spiritual advisors. Mostly girls with borderline eating disorders.” We then cut to Julie sitting in a class where her professor blatantly flirts with her under the guise of a “hypothetical” question about meeting her at a party and being attracted to her. It doesn’t take long for a series of incriminating photos of said professor to appear in her phone. And, as she’s flipping through these photos, the narrator realizes for her, “Actually she was a visual person.” Cue Julie telling her mother, “Now I know. I want to be a photographer.”
More hesitant in her supportiveness, her mother replies, “As long as you’re serious about it.” Julie insists that she is, spending her student loans on camera equipment and taking a job at a bookstore to further supplement her latest passion. Which, if nothing else, leads her to meet a different kind of crowd. Including her own photography subjects as she takes to sleeping with one and going to a party with him. One during which the narrator notes, “Suddenly Oslo was a different city. New faces, new places.” Among the new faces is Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a successful comic book artist best known for a slightly misogynistic series called Bobcat. It doesn’t take long for Julie to forget who she came with in the first place as she jumps into bed with Aksel.
The next morning, he candidly informs her, “If we go on, I’ll fall in love with you. Then it’ll be too late. Maybe we should agree to stop seeing each other.” “Okay,” she says with nonchalance, but one can tell she’s a bit sad about the kibosh. He continues, “The problem is our age difference. I’m just afraid we’ll fall into a vicious circle. You’re much younger than I am. You’ll start to question who you are. I’m past forty, I’ve entered a new phase. Whereas you still need time to find yourself. You don’t need me waiting… I’m just afraid we’ll hurt each other.” His own self-assurance and maturity seem to get her to fall in love right then and there as she decides to run back to him after starting to descend the steps of his building to leave.
Enter the “Woody Allen music” that is Billie Holiday’s rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight” while Julie proceeds to move in with Aksel. “That’s how relationships work,” he instructs her at one point as they continue to get accustomed to “compromise” within the space and how it’s arranged. But regardless of Julie’s “greenness” when it comes to embracing domestic life, she settles in quite nicely to the setup, and things seem to go well for a while. Up until the moment Aksel takes her to his friends’ house for a weekend and she’s met with the brutal age difference reality he was talking about. For all of his friends have kids that they’ve decided to bring along. And clearly, Julie is not Team Kid. Something that unfortunately has to come up when Aksel mentions that he’s ready to have one. She, of course, is not. At twenty-nine going on thirty, she’s still trying to finish this graduate studies program and figure out her “moneymaker.” Yet he criticizes her for “waiting” for something more to happen in her life, hence his accusation, “You seem to be waiting for something, I don’t know what.” It’s an accustation that feels condescending in that it would never be said to a man. For the fact that a woman knows her freedom is over once she has a child is not something a man recognizes for himself as he maintains the liberty to continue “bopping around” as though childless.
On that same “getaway,” Julie also calls out another double standard to one of Aksel’s mansplaining friends (who, in turn, mocks her for expressing herself by calling it “womansplaining”), demanding, “Where’s the menstrual period?” with regard to the representation of female aspects of existence that simply don’t go addressed in books and films because it’s “unpleasant” for men to acknowledge. That little line comes back in a big way later on when Julie decides to ingest some of her new boyfriend Eivind’s (Herbert Nordrum) mushroom stash and take a trip that leads her on quite a journey. One in which, at certain moments her body is that of an old woman’s saggy, zaftig frame. In another, she is sitting in front of her neglectful father and pulls her tampon out in front of him, tossing it right at him as she smears the blood from it beneath her eyes like warpaint.
Eivind is a “good sport” about the “messiness” of her trip. After all, he was immediately familiarized with her “wild” character at the wedding she crashed when they first met. And yes, the aimlessness, the “quirky charm” of Julie’s persona is, of course, a more palatable “European-ified” version of Frances Halladay (Greta Gerwig) in Frances Ha. Except Julie is far more interested in relationships than Frances. Perhaps because Frances’ passion is already established in the form of dance. With Julie only loosely interested in writing, it leads her to formulate an essay called “Oral Sex in the Age of #MeToo.” One of those “think pieces” designed to cause outrage among feminists whenever a woman shows herself to “like it rough and degrading.”
The virality of the essay does little to impress Julie’s father, who continues to sidestep any meaningful connection with her, instead overtly preferring his “do-over daughter” with his second wife. Obviously, the “daddy issues” will be considered a factor by many in analyzing Julie’s attachment problems with men. Perhaps that’s why she can’t bring herself to stay in her commitment with Aksel, offering us a prime fantastical Amélie moment when, midway through the film, as he’s about to pour her some coffee, she hits the light switch and causes time to freeze so that she can run through the city to meet Eivind at the coffee shop where he told her he works most every day. This, too, goes back to a scene of Frances running through the streets of New York as David Bowie’s “Modern Love” plays. For the “modern woman” is always running either away or toward something, rushed in her state of being overwhelmed and overworked by the expectations of the society she inhabits.
This marks Julie’s transition into a new phase. One that doesn’t feel quite so carefree anymore. She knows that staying with Aksel is objectively the better choice, and that she’ll probably regret abandoning him. Yet some part of her must realize that this is her last chance for “youthful recklessness” in love. By breaking away from the seriousness of her relationship with Aksel, she can still tell herself she’s free. Free to pursue whatever dick or métier strikes her fancy before all the options dry up the way they did on Sylvia Plath’s metaphorical fig tree. And, in a certain sense, Eivind is like her version of Aidan. Not quite the real true love to Aksel’s Mr. Big influence over her life. An influence that becomes apparent when she finds out through one of Aksel’s friends that he has pancreatic cancer. This after seeing him on a particularly bad interview with what he calls a “fucking self-righteous” “post-feminist.”
Immediately knowing that she must reconnect with him, it feels like an opportunity for them to perhaps reunite sexually, but it quickly becomes apparent that that’s not what a truly deep relationship is about (even though Britney Spears’ “Inside Out” would have been a perfect song choice to soundtrack such an instant).
Both Aksel and Julie understand that what they had truly was a “once-in-a-lifetime” kind of special, with Julie confessing to him, “I felt I could tell you anything. You wouldn’t judge me.” It appears to cut both ways as Aksel also gives her a heart-wrenching speech on how he knows she was the love of his life, even if that might not be the case for her. He also remarks once more on the generational divide he feels with the current one, explaining to Julie, “I grew up in an age without internet and mobile phones… I sound like an old fart but I think about it a lot. The world that I knew has disappeared. For me, it was all about going to stores. Record stores… I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because we could live among them. We could pick them up, hold them in our hands. Compare them… That’s all I have. I spent my life doing that… Now it’s all I have left. Knowledge and memories of stupid, futile things nobody cares about.” But Julie tells him she could only wish to have lived in a time like that, where one wasn’t made to question if everything they did was “right” or not. They just did it. No Thought Police, no pressure.
With her Eivind dilemma presently made more problematic because she finds out she’s pregnant, the relief she feels in yet another iconic scene when her period unexpectedly arrives in the shower leads into an ending that also mirrors Frances Ha in that, finally, she comes to the conclusion that not being in a relationship is possibly the healthiest thing she can do for herself if she truly wants to “become,” the very advice Aksel gave her in the first place.
A slow zoom-out of her working contentedly in her own apartment serves as the final scene, bearing a similar message to the one exhibited by Frances alone in her apartment (for she, at last, gets a place of her own, too) and then putting her name on the intercom (the label being too long to fit, therefore cut off to read: “Frances Ha”). So it is that each woman unearths a kind of autonomy for themselves that Amélie Poulain never quite did.
