MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK
by Myrah Valmyr on April 28, 2025
Posted in: Uncategorized
Imagine how crazy it was in 1927 for movies to finally get sound. Like, you pull up to the theatre with your homegirl expecting a silent and gyrating Charlie Chaplin in black and white with subtitles, but instead it’s some other guy gyrating in black and white and there’s MUSIC. And it’s jazz! Huge.
The 2021 Norwegian film “Verdens Verste Menneske,” directed by Joachim Trier, translates to “The Worst Person in the World.” It has been stuck in my head, repeating and skipping, like a banged-up record for a while now. The 2-hour run time is neatly summarized by Google automated feedback as such:
“A young woman battles indecisiveness as she traverses the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path.”
Without giving too much of the film away, I think it’s clear from the start that there isn’t anything that unique about our protagonist Julie and her journey through her late 20s/early 30s. Her inability to make any grounding choices, at first, comes off as frustratingly heedless, veering on pretentious, but is quickly revealed to be a genuine loss and lack of direction. The film’s strength and authenticity lies under a thin sheet of sarcasm. It laughs at itself yet the characters totally believe and mean what they do and say. It revels in how it looks and how it sounds. It looks like what it is conveying: confusion and a desire for an anchor. A desire never satisfied, yet it’s sound pushes back on this notion.
What I remember most from my first viewing of “The Worst Person in the World,” is every needle drop: a moment in which a song prods so perfectly at whatever the film is barking at, a scene clicking into place like a memory. It tells you that you’ve always been in this moment, that this has happened before, and that it’s going to happen again and again. It may also be a warning, or a sign, like a bad omen. Sometimes a carefully placed song fuels falsity and unease.
“Waters of March” by Art Garfunkel is a simple enough song. It’s literally a list of things:
“A stick, a stone, it’s the end of the road
It’s the rest of a stump, it’s a little alone
It’s a sliver of glass, it’s a life, it’s the sun
It is night, it is death, it’s a trap, it’s a gun”
This song states things as they are. So clear, so firm, in stasis, and it feels like a sick joke on our poor, muddled Julie. The music clashes with her actions and what she wants (or thinks she wants…or is told that she wants).
“I Said Goodbye to Me” by Harry Nilsson is another song like this: flittering, hunkered down, beautifully bliss. There are two Harry Nilsson songs in this film, the other being “I Will Take You There,” which feels similarly. The former goes like this:
“I said goodbye to me,
I looked in the mirror,
Then I began to cry
I’ll leave my things behind for all to see
And hope that she will
understand why.”
What exactly is happening between the sound and the screen? We can see “the treachery of images,” in how it pairs with the sound. The songs are either ironic or tone deaf to what is happening. Whatever it is lies in how I make sense of music as a tool in a film. It is either:
(a) Being heard by a specific character in the film AND the audience
(b) Supposed to be heard ONLY by a specific character and we, the audience, are intruding
(c) Being heard by JUST the audience; character(s) completely oblivious to it
I’m sure there’s something to be said about most of the songs being American/in English in this Norwegian film but I’m not sure what. Maybe it is a more straight-forward attempt to put distance between the audience (assuming that the audience in question is English-speaking) and Julie. Or maybe Trier just has a taste for it.
And as for music as a tool in “The Worst Person in the World,” I’m leaning on this being a choice (c) moment.
But I’m also open to the idea that music like this, plain in message and delivery, instrumentally pure, is a crutch for someone like Julie, easing the chaos of her life. With that, she becomes comfortable with the grasping, and no answer becomes an answer. Everything is a coincidence and everything is embarrassing. There is no bow, no seal, and there is no cherry, but here is this sweet, sweet song that feels like a closing, so it must be enough, because it is all we have.
“The Worst Person in the World” Soundtrack Highlights:
- Waters of March by Art Garfunkel
- I Said Goodbye to Me by Harry Nilsson
- Bad Feeling by Cobra Man
- Bells by Bigbang
- The Way You Look Tonight by Billie Holiday
- Pieces Froides: No. 2 Trios Danses De Travers by Erik Satie, Klara Kormendi
- Stay With Me by Glamour Hammer
- Maybe In The Summer by Sassy 009
- I Will Take You There by Harry Nilsson
