When Love Meets Ego: The Existential Spiral of 'The Coolest Person In The World'
I personally love watching couples fight. (On screen, for the most part — though public spaces can be entertaining sometimes too.) The fight scene from Marriage Story is one of my favourite scenes I’ve ever watched. It’s brutal and raw, but also incredible, as you see these two people’s relationship crumble right in front of your eyes.
I think we are usually at our worst when we fight with the people we love most. We become rude, inconsiderate, and bitter, revealing the most undesirable parts of ourselves. Everything bubbles up, their worst anxieties, their biggest regrets, their most well-hidden inadequacies. You are laid bare, which is why we are probably also the most human when we fight.
And fighting when you’re young and in love, man, that’s an entirely different ball game. You spend most of your youth explaining to your parents, teachers, and other authority figures why you are the way you are, and you expect your friends, especially your partner, to always understand and never question that part of you. When they do, it feels like you’ve been turned upside down on your axis. The unthinkable has happened: you’ve been betrayed. It’s a fascinating example of just how impulsive and irrational human beings can be.
Bombil Films’ 'Coolest Person In The World' is about Nikhil, who rehashes his recent breakup with Sasha as he pieces their relationship together in reverse, in a state of existential delirium.
The film becomes an interesting case study of what young, modern relationships between contemporaries look like. What happens when two people with similar aspirations are vying for the same goals? Does the relationship turn into a competitive sport? Who gets the bag first — and do they share? And more importantly, is the other person a gracious loser, happy that the love of their life got exactly what they wanted?
Nikhil and Sasha’s relationship unfolds in four chapters, with the narrative moving backwards in time, slowly peeling back the layers of what once held them together. By retracing the relationship in reverse, the film allows us to understand why these two people, who seemingly have nothing in common except that they’re both writers, even began dating in the first place. Instead of watching love build, we watch it disintegrate and then trace the cracks to their origin. Everything is told from Nikhil’s perspective, and he is a very… self-absorbed and deeply unlikeable protagonist. He’s meant to be that way. The film doesn’t try to redeem him. And yet, despite all of this, you still feel for him. Perhaps it’s because the film allows us access to his remorse.
The film does get verbose and wordy at times, maybe even pretentious. Nikhil, especially, often sounds hyper-aware of his own cleverness, as though he is performing introspection rather than actually engaging in it. The self-awareness can feel indulgent, bordering on self-mythologising. Simultaneously it also makes sense, because Nikhil and Sasha are writers, and our most real fallibility is that we often confuse our articulation equals understanding, and in his desperate need to make sense of what happened he skips the silences, keeping his mind completely in motion.
'Coolest Person In The World' shows that love, particularly young love, cannot be edited into coherence. You can replay it, reorder it, analyse it to exhaustion, but you cannot out-argue the ways you failed each other. And as Nikhil retraces the story, you realise that perhaps the most difficult person to confront after a relationship ends is not your partner, but the version of yourself you allowed yourself to become.
Watch the trailer of The Coolest Person in the World:
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