The Young Girls of Rochefort

I got the idea, I think, very much from Jacques Demy movies. The first one in particular was 'The Young Girls of Rochefort'.

Damien Chazelle has said that Jacques Demy, a French director who in 1964 made a film where every single word is sung, showed him that a musical could carry genuine tragedy rather than manufactured joy. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg ends in loss. Chazelle built the ending of La La Land from that lesson. Cherbourg is streaming on Criterion Channel and has the same color palette, the same impossible romance, and a sadder ending.

Demy taught cinema that tone could shift like weather, that a film could move from musical joy to genuine melancholy without losing its coherence, that romance and disappointment could coexist in the same frame. The Worst Person in the World absorbs this completely. It's a film about a woman's twenties, which means it's a film about promise and compromise, desire and accident, the moment when spontaneous life becomes something more complicated. Like Demy, Trier treats small choices and small ruptures as genuinely devastating, and the city (Oslo, not Cherbourg) becomes a character that mirrors her changing emotional weather.