Lying in the Gutters: A Double Feature of Finding Someone to Put Up With You
FACETS is screening Joachim Trier’s Oscar nominated comedy-drama, The Worst Person in the World (2021), April 16-17, 2022. We’ve paired this refreshingly nuanced character portrait with a film exploring similar themes, American Splendor (2003), available for FACETS Members to rent from our expansive rentals collection.
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
DIRECTED BY JOACHIM TRIER
One of 2021’s most acclaimed films, The Worst Person in the World closes out director Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy” cycle of films with striking style.
The film encapsulates the trials of Julie (Renate Reinsve, who won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance) as she tries to figure out her career path and whether or not her love life is a total disaster. After having an epiphany, she leaves medical school and breaks up with her boyfriend to work in psychology. Soon after, she’s trying photography while dating Aksel (Anders Danielson Lie) a middle aged cartoonist whose graphic novels have recently come under fire for dated material. Finding some sense of belonging in a relationship and purpose in her work eludes Julie as she keeps trying to make the right choice for a future that’s less precarious than today.
As she moves from her late 20’s and into her 30’s, Julie works the pressure of how your life can change quickly with what seem like minor decisions. Trier renders this journey, divided into 14 sections, with energetic variety and memorable style. The surreal can intrude into Julie’s world easily, such as a sequence where time seems to stop for everyone but her and she runs through a city populated by people frozen in place.
Over at The Atlantic, critic David Sims shouted out how Trier “…swerves from bustling comedy to erotically charged romance to bittersweet drama, executing each tonal shift seamlessly…” and named it as his top film the year. Familiar in its topic but unique in its ability to define a generation’s outlook, The Worst Person in the World is a stylish take on the quarter life crisis.
See it at the FACETS Cinema this weekend of April 16th and 17th with showtimes throughout the day. You can buy tickets here.
AMERICAN SPLENDOR
DIRECTED BY SHERRI SPRINGER BERMAN AND ROBERT PULCINI
Seemingly destined to become a modern classic on release in 2003, American Splendor has somewhat fallen by the wayside even within the celebrated career of lead actor Paul Giamatti.Directed by married filmmakers Sherri Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (Cinema Verite), American Splendor is a journey into the mind of Harvey Pekar: pessimistic yet unfailingly honest chronicler of the quotidian stories that exist between the major events of our lives.
After meeting underground comix artist Robert Crumb (James Urbaniak) shopping for records at a yard sale, the two become friends and years later Pekar realizes he wants to make a new kind of comic autobiography. Crumb becomes the first to illustrate the non-fiction slice-of-life anthology comic American Splendor that Pekar writes. The Splendor comics bring some level of fame for Pekar: appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, theater adaptations. But it most importantly allows him to meet Splendor reader and kindred spirit Joyce Brabner (Hope Davis) who he eventually marries.
Their relationship forms the film’s take on the nature of the Splendor comics, a grounding response to the cynical outlook Pekar has on the world at large. Pekar and Brabner actually appear as themselves in documentary vignettes spliced between scenes of their actor portrayals, metatextual moments that invoke the source material’s approach of someone’s autobiography filtered through artistic collaboration.
The result makes for a film that shears away the standard veneer of many a biopic for something that a notorious grump like Pekar could tolerate participating in. Reviewed on release at the AV Club, Scott Tobias writes that “…the film thrives on the tension that comes from an artist who devotes himself to the truth, but watches his image get away from him.”
The film makes for an interesting companion to The Worst Person in the World since they both ponder on the restless nature of everyday being. The comic angle helps for a more direct connection: the character of Aksel has work that would spring from similar underground comic traditions. But in terms of character, Pekar is as obsessed with being noticed in some manner just as Julie keeps trying to find some sense of fulfillment between work and romance. Both films reject the trappings of their filmic genres, making for a pairing that’s formally engaging in a combined dissection of the typical and expected.
You can rent American Splendor anytime from FACETS.
Richard Hooper is an Editorial Assistant Intern at FACETS and hopes, like everyone else, that the rumored new David Lynch film for Cannes is real. He has an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, writing his thesis on intermediality in animated film. He’s worked with film practically and critically, and a piece of his heart will always belong with 35mm projection.