November 10, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Reading Margaret Talbot’s absorbing profile of Joachim Trier, I recalled the strange sequence in Trier’s great The Worst Person in the World, in which the film’s central character Julie is the only person moving; everyone else is frozen still. Why? What is Trier’s point? Talbot mentions this scene. She writes,

In an inventive scene in which Julie runs to find Eivind again, Oslo kindly stops and freezes for her—a sequence shot with extras standing stock still, not with C.G.I.—so that she can capture stolen time with him without having to end things yet with Aksel. 

So she can capture stolen time with him? I don’t know about that. Time stops for everyone else, but Julie keeps moving. Time doesn’t stop for her. Anthony Lane, in his illuminating review of the film, provides a different take. He says,

Or what about the instant at which the surrounding world—humans, vehicles, dogs, the flow of coffee from a pot—freezes in mid-action, allowing Julie, the solitary mover, to run through the motionless streets toward Eivind, whom she badly needs to embrace? How better to illustrate the ecstatic indifference with which, in the throes of a silly love, we obscure everything that is not our object of desire? 

To me, this makes more sense. Julie and Eivind are so absorbed in each other, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t register. They see only each other. All else is irrelevant. Trier’s freezing of the action around Julie is his way of showing the obsessive nature of romantic love. 

2. James Wood, in his excellent “Last Harvest,” reviews Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel Death and the Gardener. Wood likes it. He says, “This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer.” My favorite passage in Wood’s piece describes Gospodinov’s exploration of his childhood in the Sovietized Bulgaria of the nineteen-seventies and eighties: “These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory.”

3. Hannah Goldfield went to an awful lot of trouble to host a World Series party. She describes it in her wonderful “Tableau Vivant.” Here’s a sample:

On Thursday, the day before the game, I braised the pork shoulder and mixed the crab dip, feeling triumphant in my preparedness. On Friday afternoon, I found myself in an exhilarated fugue state. Doors and drawers flew open and shut as I broiled bananas covered in brown sugar, grilled steaks, and roasted pounds of wings. I chopped scallions, toasted sesame seeds, wrenched lids off of cans of beans and condensed milk. For hours, I thought of nothing but my next move, the narcotic draw of my phone blissfully suppressed. It didn’t go without a hitch. Fifteen minutes before my guests were due, the point at which Pelosi suggested I deep-fry the shrimp, I had failed to so much as set up my dredging station. I noticed that the black T-shirt I’d been wearing since 7 a.m. was smeared with whipped cream. The doorbell rang.

Wow! I hope Goldfield’s guests were appreciative. And I hope they rooted for the Jays. Otherwise, what a waste of great food.