In a sentenceShe gatecrashes a wedding, flirts with a stranger until dawn, and calls it not cheating; the film very nearly agrees with her
Julie (Renate Reinsve) is nearly thirty and living in Oslo, and she has already abandoned medicine for psychology and psychology for photography. At a party she meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), who is older than her and tells her they are at different stages of life; she moves in with him anyway. A weekend at a cabin with his friends and their small children raises the question of what she wants next, and she has no answer. Walking home alone from a launch for Aksel’s book, she slips into a stranger’s wedding party and spends the night talking to Eivind (Herbert Nordrum), who has a girlfriend, Sunniva (Maria Grazia Di Meo). They agree that nothing they do before dawn counts as cheating.
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Joachim Trier’s twelve-chapter portrait of a woman who cannot settle, in work or in love, is funny, quick and sadder than it first lets on. Renate Reinsve holds it together when the film’s own cleverness threatens not to.
Julie is nearly thirty, and the film gets through her twenties in a few minutes: medicine, then psychology, then photography, a new haircut and a new boyfriend with each, a narrator explaining her reasoning in the same even tone whether or not the reasoning is any good. Then she meets Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), who is older and surer of himself, and the film slows down and gives her a prologue, twelve chapters and an epilogue in which to work out what she wants. Joachim Trier, writing again with Eskil Vogt, has set two earlier films in this city, both with Danielsen Lie in them, and this is the warmest of the three by some distance. It is also the one fondest of its own devices. The verdict first, though: it is a good film, we recommend it, and the person who makes it good is Renate Reinsve.
She plays Julie as someone always slightly ahead of the conversation she is in and slightly behind her own life. Watch her at the cabin weekend, among Aksel’s friends and their toddlers, deciding halfway through a sentence that she is bored of the woman she can hear talking. Watch her at the wedding party she walks into uninvited, laying out for Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) the rules of the game they are about to play, and enjoying the rules more than the game. Reinsve does not ask us to forgive Julie and does not apologise for her. The title is a joke Julie would make about herself, and Reinsve plays it as a joke with something underneath.
Kasper Andersen shoots Oslo in long, pale summer evenings, the kind of light in which nobody wants to go home, and he keeps the camera close enough to Reinsve’s face that we can watch her change her mind. Roger Rosenberg gives Aksel a flat with books to the ceiling and a drawing board by the window, the home of a man whose life is furnished, and gives Eivind almost nothing, which is the point. Olivier Bugge Coutté cuts the early chapters fast, on the beat of the narration, and then lets scenes run once Julie has somewhere to stay.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe. What we can say is that Danielsen Lie plays a man who is sure of his opinions and is starting to suspect that certainty was not the achievement he took it for. The late conversations between Aksel and Julie moved us more than anything else in the film, and more than we expected from a film this pleased with its own jokes. They are shot plainly, two people sitting and talking about what they were to each other, and Bugge Coutté lets them run without cutting for reaction. Reinsve listens in these scenes as well as she talks, which is rarer than it sounds.
Not all of it works. There is a chapter in which Julie takes mushrooms and the film takes them with her, and what follows is the one stretch where Trier’s imagination and Julie’s part company: rubbery bodies, an appearance by her father Per Harald (Vidar Sandem), jokes landing at half strength. It is the only sequence that feels made to be described afterwards. The chapter title cards, wry at first, become a tic by the ninth. And the film is softer on Julie than its title pretends. Her carelessness costs other people more than it costs her, and Trier is more interested in how she feels about that than in how they do. Sunniva (Maria Grazia Di Meo), Eivind’s girlfriend, gets one funny paragraph of narration about her yoga and her recycling and is then put away. The epilogue is tidier than the twelve chapters that earned it.
Most critics have been warmer than we are, and a few have found the whole thing cold, a romance about someone who cannot commit, made by someone who will not commit to a view of her. We understand the complaint without sharing it. Trier is counting what Julie’s indecision costs, in Ola Fløttum’s spare piano and in Andersen’s light going from summer to something greyer, and he lets her notice the bill late, which is when most of us do.
It is a 15 certificate and 128 minutes, and the minutes go quickly. See it with someone you have been with long enough to argue about it afterwards. You will, and Julie will come out of the argument about as well as she comes out of the film.
The reviews are warm and broadly agreed. Most critics find Joachim Trier’s film funny, tender and wistful, and nearly all of them put Renate Reinsve at the centre of their praise, calling her performance the reason Julie’s mistakes never turn the audience against her. Anders Danielsen Lie’s Aksel draws the next largest share of attention, several critics naming his later scenes as the film’s most moving. The sequence in which time stops as Julie runs through Oslo is picked out more than once.
The reservations are about the final stretch. Several critics, IndieWire and Deadline among them, feel the last act turns tidier and more conventional than the fragmented storytelling before it. Sight and Sound questions how indulgent the film is towards Julie. The one real dissent comes from The i Paper, which finds the film cold and its romanticising of indecision tired, while still admiring Reinsve. The spread is otherwise narrow.
Copeman finds the film wistful, warm and deeply affecting. He singles out Renate Reinsve’s charismatic, relatable performance as the reason Julie’s mistakes never make her seem villainous.
Read the full review →Bradshaw calls the film a tender, funny and beguiling romantic coming-of-age story, an instant classic. He especially praises Renate Reinsve’s sensitive, sympathetic performance and says it makes her a star.
Read the full review →Kemp calls the film a truthful, tender masterpiece and finds its portrayal of love and growing up deeply affecting. She especially praises Renate Reinsve’s tour-de-force performance and the film’s naturalistic, wise script.
Read the full review →The critic calls the film a sweet, funny, keenly observed character study and suggests it could become a future classic. She particularly praises the central trio’s chemistry and the film’s sharp, truthful dialogue.
Read the full review →Chang finds the film charming, wistful and tender, praising its empathetic portrayal of Julie’s changing sense of self. He singles out Renate Reinsve’s thrilling, quicksilver performance as the film’s center of gravity.
Read the full review →The critic sees the film as a lively, affecting restoration of the romantic comedy that makes familiar themes feel significant again. Renate Reinsve’s nuanced performance is singled out for giving Julie a sense of depth and subjectivity.
Read the full review →
Reprise · not on Fi1m yetTrier’s first Oslo film, two young writers, the same restlessness with less kindness.
Frances HaAnother woman running through a city because standing still is unbearable.
Before SunsetTwo people talking in real time about the life they did not have together.
The SouvenirA young woman, an older man and the slow discovery of what she has agreed to.
Toni ErdmannGerman, longer, sillier and just as sharp about a daughter’s unfinished life.
