What to think of “Julie (in 12 chapters)”, the Norwegian film acclaimed at Cannes?

Joaquim Trier’s cinema was known for its ability to move (sometimes too much), to plunge the viewer into a gentle lethargy, or to bog him down in a sublime picture of suffering, leaving him stunned, half frightened, half subjugated, or sometimes outright changed. In any case, this kind of cinema, centred on spleen, mourning (Back Home), the nightmare of addiction (Oslo, 31 August) and the decay of friendships (Nouvelle Donne), created a transcendent but depressing imaginary, where male characters seem ready to throw themselves out of a window at every scene. He brought to the world, an ultra-realistic Norwegian auteur cinema, even stripped-down, and impressive in its fury and simplicity. It also revealed a filmmaker who, obviously, had a lot on his plate. So we didn’t really expect, since his first selection at Cannes for his adaptation of The Will-o’-the-Wisp (Oslo, August 31), that Joaquim Trier would deliver a film about love, deception, breakups, existential questions, binge drinking, illness… In short, about life. 

Julie (in 12 chapters) thus places herself on the edge of two worlds. On the one hand, the filmmaker’s usual Osloite wanderings and long introspections, and on the other, the lightness of existence, the games of seduction, and the embodiment of the feeling undoubtedly specific to youth: tomorrow life can change – but for the better. Above all, the film features for the first time a female character who, unlike her male counterparts who are always stuck in their doldrums, is free, casual and emancipated. He embraces contemporary questions, wondering, like millions of ultra-connected thirty-somethings, if the job he has chosen is the right one, if he wants to bring a child into the world in a society ready to collapse and if he should leave the person he believed to be the love of his life. 

Renate Reinsve, who received the Best Actress Award at the last Cannes Film Festival, plays Julie, a young woman whose life is fixed on the twelve chapters of the film. She is as if stuck, in Oslo, in the theatre of her existence: in a relationship with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie), a controversial comic book author, she forces herself not to think about the man she has just met at a party… until, during a liberating scene where time and people are completely frozen, she runs to find him to embrace him. Finally, she realizes that we are in the world only for this: to know this big-bang that eradicates everything around us and propels us light years away from the earth. A feeling we call love. But Julie, in her burst of experimentation, does not take long to realize that the feeling of love is like the desire, which one has at twenty, to practice this or that profession: it evolves. And so is Joaquim Trier’s cinema.

Julie (in 12 chapters), by Joaquim Trier, starring Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie, in cinemas on Wednesday.