Joachim Trier’s “rom com for people who hate rom coms” is framed by shots of his 30-year-old heroine, a contemporary Miss Julie (Renate Reinsve) whose unduly harsh self-appraisal provides the film’s title.
By the way, this Julie is not that bad. Just an example of Millennial Malaise. Over the narrative’s four years she goes through a restless search for her true self, two off-kilter love affairs, a pregnancy and miscarriage and finally a modest stability. It’s all between — and in — those two shots.
In the first she stands at the center of the screen, looking to our right. She is elegantly dressed and smoking — the idle center of her world. In the last shot she’s seated at her worktable on the left side, facing left, working st her craft and current identity — photography. This is after her first lover has died of cancer and the second gone back to his wife and baby.
Initially Julie tastes several careers — doctor, psychologist, art photographer, part-time bookseller, commercial photographer. The last shot leaves her functioning but at a careful remove from any vaunting idealism, as satirized in Eivind’s absurdly activist Suvinna: “Batteries had blood on their hands. The sum of Western guilt sat beside him on the couch.” As an on-set stills photographer Julie is at the fringe of the art-making life-probing world in which she engages us, indeed exists. The center proves peripheral.
Julie’s two affairs update traditional screwball comedy. She and cartoonist Aksel “fell in love” at the moment he ends their budding relationship because he’s 10 years older than she is and hence with different focus.
However more secure in himself, even his starry career is fractured by opposite forces. His comics indulge the antics of an obscenely macho bobcat (heir to the Fritz cat extension of the great Krazy). But the feature film adaptation violates his vision by neutering his character for the Christmas season. Aksel is equally helpless — but far less rewarded — when his TV turns into a feminist attack on the violence and sexism of his work. His cancer becomes a fatal emblem of that rot.
In classic screwball style, Julie meets the married Eivind when she crashes a wedding. Having vowed not to betray their mates, they work out an intimacy without sex. That begins in their shared toilet stall scene and ends in Julie’s shower miscarriage. Equally offbeat, they appear to establish their hectic romance in the few seconds it takes Aksel to pour her coffee.
Julie ends both relationships because she can’t fully feel or express herself in them. “Everything we feel, we have to put into words. Sometimes, I just want to feel things.” She masterfully leads a man into explaining — thus exemplifying — “mansplaining.” While Aksel mutters on, Julie is struck that at 30 she still identifies with young Bambi, insecure on ice. She both loves and doesn’t love Aksel so feels she’s playing a supporting role in her own life. So her fringe job in film at least sharpens her focus.
This film’s exploration of the modern woman is a salutary alternative to the mainstream Julie observes, which focuses exclusively on men and their issues. “Personally, I feel like I know everything about male problems. Erectile dysfunction, morning wood, infatuation with young women, premature ejaculation. It's in all the books and movies.Where's the menstrual period? Female orgasm and desire? Where?” As she observed her fellow students earlier, “Norway's future spiritual advisers” are “Mostly girls with borderline eating disorders.”
As Aksel regards his shortening life, he’s at odds with the current ethos of the insubstantial, the world of internet: “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.” Now “It just happened... I began to worship what had been. And now I have nothing else. I have no future. I can only look back. And... It's not even nostalgia. It's... Fear of death. It's because I'm scared. It has nothing to do with art. I'm just trying to process.”
And that’s where we leave our Miss Julie, processing. The privileged young woman has just encountered the harsher reality of life and is at work. Remember, at 30 Julie’s grandmother played Rebecca West in Rosmersholm! Working away on her film proofs, as the narrator telling her own story this Julie is making her way even while working at the commercial edge of her art. Even the marginal can find their center.
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