The old maxim that men have only one thing on their minds gets an expansive corrective in Dag Johan Haugerud‘s “Sex” — the very title of which cheekily misdirects us with its blunt simplicity. Sex certainly comes up early and often in this playful, intricately nuanced character study, but in consistently surprising, stereotype-averse ways. Following two straight male co-workers as they open up to each other about recent experiences that have challenged their own sexual and gender identities, Haugerud’s sly comedy addresses various crises of modern masculinity with a light, humane touch, finding more curiosity than toxicity in its workaday characters — and making a case for seemingly aberrant desires and impulses as an everyday fact of life.
With its loosely discursive quality — it’s clear Haugerud was a novelist before he turned to filmmaking — and measured, good-humored approach to subject matter usually treated with more heated, heightened drama on screen, “Sex” aptly sets the tone for the director’s trilogy of films examining human relationships and intimacy in modern Norway. It premiered in the Panorama sidebar of last year’s Berlinale, before the entire project got a significant boost with a Venice competition slot for the second entry, “Love.” The third, “Dreams,” will premiere internationally in Berlin’s competition this month, upon which those distributors who have been waiting for the full picture to emerge can determine the best release plan for these unusual but warmly accessible films. (Strand Releasing has secured the trilogy for the U.S.) Each stands independently as a narrative, though they share all manner of complementary themes and perspectives.
As well as the most provocative title, “Sex” boasts the punchiest story hook, unveiled at the very outset in a conversation cleverly framed at first as a therapy session. In a blandly neutral office space, one man (Thorbjorn Harr) more or less monologues to an initially unseen listener, recounting the strange details of a recent dream that hasn’t left his mind — in which he meets a God-like figure in the form of David Bowie, and gradually realizes that Bowie is regarding him as a woman. The camera eventually pans to reveal not an analyst but a sympathetic colleague (Jan Gunnar Roise) at the Oslo chimney-sweeping company where he works as a supervisor. Neither man is named in the course of the film, though other characters — most notably their children — are: We’re invited to see both as everymen of a certain age.
Far from the jockish teasing you might expect, the colleague reacts to this admission of subconscious gender questioning with gentle empathy — not least because he has something of his own to confess. The previous day, he explains, he was cleaning a client’s chimney when the client casually propositioned him. At first he refused and left, before changing his mind, returning to the client’s house, and enjoying some no-strings afternoon delight. For the chimney sweep, a straight, middle-aged married man, it was the first time he had slept outside his marriage; it was also the first time he had ever had sex with a guy. Indeed, the whole experience is so novel to him that he doesn’t even deem it an act of infidelity: As soon as he gets home, he tells his wife (Siri Forberg), who naturally doesn’t see things quite the same way.
What emerges from this impulsive act and its fallout, along with his supervisor’s concurrent exploration of a hitherto untapped femininity within him, is a complex but sprightly study of how men wish to be seen, desired and understood in a culture that still places so much emphasis on their own active gaze. The chimney sweep doesn’t doubt his heterosexuality in the wake of his queer encounter — “One beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic,” he tells his nonplussed wife — but does feel an exhilaration in having been wanted that way, so far outside the bounds of his life an a conventional family man. For the other man, meanwhile, those initially disorientating dreams cue a release from the strictures of masculine expectations and self-image, demonstrated through his increasingly liberated performances in a local choir.
Haugerud’s writing is thoughtful and rife with substantial ideas, but also delights in puckish diversions and shaggy-dog anecdotes — some of which illuminate the themes at hand, while others merely highlight the eccentric perversity of man in general. Best of all, he takes his characters at their word, without judgment or cynical point-scoring off their behavior. In a sense, the story world of “Sex” is a kind of Scandi idyll — shot by DP Cecilie Semec with a perennially airy brightness — where men get to experiment sexually and psychologically without facing violent prejudice or binary assumptions from the outside world, give or take some maturely handled domestic discord at home. That may strike some viewers as more progressive, or indeed more fantastical, than others. But as a thought experiment, and indeed a body experiment, it’s unexpectedly seductive.
