Renate Reinsve is spellbinding in this pitch-perfect romantic comedy, as a young woman who wants everything in life, but isn’t sure where to begin.
The film opens with Julie (Reinsve) as a medical student, before she switches to psychology, then photography, where she has a fling with a guy on a shoot before dumping him at a party for comic-book artist Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). And the film has barely begun. Joachim Trier and regular co-writer Eskil Vogt’s script, directed by Trier, give us this fast but event-filled set-up to immerse us in Julie’s psyche, but it’s Reinsve who makes credible every one of her character’s life decisions.
The best romantic comedies always have an air of magic about them. Trier is new to the genre. His previous films have been darker, pushing his characters to the very edge of their emotional and psychological state. It’s all the more surprising then that Trier and Vogt (who has also directed the superb recent chiller The Innocents) not only feel comfortable in this lighter mode, that magic which separates the good romantic comedies from the great is here in abundance. But the best trick of the film is Reinsve’s luminous performance.
