A tender and gently probing Norwegian drama about a pair of Oslo chimney sweeps whose lives are forever changed when they casually open up to each other in between jobs one morning, Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Sex” — the standalone first installment of the director’s Kieślowski-inspired “Sex, Love, Dreams” trilogy — is a far cry from the prurient spectacle promised by its title. Indeed, this sweet and chatty film, in which sex is often discussed but never depicted, could just as easily have been called “Love” or “Dreams” (that it wasn’t seems like a joke typical of Haugerud’s dry sense of humor).
But that isn’t to accuse the director of a bait-and-switch. As Oscar Wilde is quoted to have said: “Everything is about sex, except sex.” In that sense, “Sex” is more about sex than it ever could have been if it contained any sex. While “Sex” may be light on the act itself, the movie is deeply — almost spiritually — engaged in what it means to people, and why it plays such an outsized role in the way that we self-identify and see each other.
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“Sex” is a story about the parts of ourselves that we decide to share with each other, and even more so a story about the vulnerability of sharing them. It starts with the higher-ranked of the two chimney sweeps (the handsome Thorbjørn Harr, whose rugged dad aesthetic belies his character’s youthful naivete) talking his similarly unnamed subordinate (Jan Gunnar Røise) through a dream he had the previous night — a dream in which a divine figure who may or may not have been David Bowie looked at him as if he were an attractive woman. Lust is familiar to a straight man like the CEO (as he’s referred to in the credits), but the sense of being desired is elusive enough to retain its mysteries.
What inspires the CEO to share this information with his colleague? Perhaps he just needed to hear what it sounded like out loud (“It’s strange how dreams change when you start talking about them,” he observes). We certainly get the impression that it’s a radical change of pace to the usual conversations between these men, which Haugerud’s sterile, interrogative framing suggests are more focused on avoiding feelings than sharing them.
But Røise’s character, whose plain demeanor obscures the potential richness of his inner life, is eager to make the most of the strange new energy that his boss has created. As if to put the CEO at ease, he counters with an unexpected confession of his own: He had sex with a male customer the previous day. He insists that he isn’t gay (“Having one beer doesn’t make someone an alcoholic” the man says without a hint of defensiveness, anticipating a movie in which homosexual urges are a freighted invitation for self-understanding rather than something to be exorcised or submitted to), but, much like what happened in the boss’ dream, he was activated by the fact of being wanted by a stranger.
A different kind of film might have used that coincidence to spark a furtive romance between the two men, but “Sex” is more interested in seeing how these men — especially the underling — process their feelings on their own time. Røise’s chimney sweep immediately tells his wife (Siri Forberg, introduced in a long-take that hides her face from view) about the encounter, assuming that she’ll be as bewildered by it as he is. He’s right about that, but wrong to think that his wife will share the feeling that his impromptu tryst was some type of alien event — a spontaneous happening so out of character that it might as well have happened to someone else.
It’s not the act itself that upsets her so much as the intimacy he experienced without her; she ascribes to Milan Kundera’s view that sex is rooted in a mutually shared mystery, and after 20 years of marriage she resents the idea that someone else knows what her husband’s face looks like when he comes. Betrayed and wounded but never shrill or judgmental, she initially demands that he fill in the blanks of her imagination (How did they arrange their bodies? Was his ass sore afterwards?), only to later confront herself with the idea that loving someone might require her to set them free.
Her husband swears that he has no interest in repeating the experience, but his insistence further exacerbates the woman’s questions — often pained, but never shouted or showy — about why and how we limit ourselves to accommodate each other. What motivates people to share their secrets, and what right do married partners have to keep some part of themselves to themselves?
That last question looms particularly large over the course of a film that loves its characters for their anguished curiosity, and delights in being freed from the burden of having to draw its own conclusions in order to resolve a clear plot. Endowed with the flushed ambivalence of Peder Capjon Kjellsby’s jazz fusion score, “Sex” makes it clear from the start that Haugerud sees the film’s various discussions as the reason for making it in the first place, and not as a means to an end; he couldn’t care less whether the chimney sweep and his wife separate at the end, but he’s fascinated by how emotional the man gets when his wife reveals that she’s going to discuss the situation with one of her friends. “You’re making it your story,” he cries, as if that were a greater betrayal than cheating on her. As if love itself weren’t a desperately beautiful effort to create something bigger than our bodies.
“Sex” is her story, of course. It’s also — in a more literal way — also the CEO’s story as well, as the film is almost equally involved with his efforts to make sense of his dream, the effects of which assume a tangible dimension when the CEO starts to feel his voice change in the days leading up to a concert recital.
That plot, and its nested digression about the CEO’s teenage son, can’t help but feel a bit unformed in comparison to his colleague’s marital problems, but there’s an effervescent joy in Harr’s performance as a conservative man who’s taking stock of himself for the first time in his life, and that effervescence is complemented by the summer warmth of Cecilie Semac’s cinematography. You can almost feel the CEO peeling away a sunburn as he sheds a layer of dead skin, and his newfound openness allows Haugerud to use him as a conduit for the various thoughts that “Sex” has on its mind.
The CEO’s journey is much more private than his co-worker’s (nobody wants to hear about somebody else’s dreams, and he has to beg his own wife to care about the one with Bowie), but it also welcomes so many other people into the conversation at the same time. Those people include a music teacher who lectures him on Hannah Arendt, and a wildly oversharing doctor who ruminates on the sensation of having sex during the third trimester of a pregnancy, and tells the CEO a long story about a patient of hers who once made the mistake of getting a massive tattoo in tribute to his partner.
On their own, these episodes don’t amount to very much, but “Sex” layers them in with the chimney sweep’s dilemma to increasingly stirring effect, as Haugerud leverages the usual array of heteronormative hangups into a searching rumination on the vulnerability of sharing the multitudes that we each contain. This isn’t a movie that’s for or against monogamy, so much as it’s a touching — and, during its final minutes, even vaguely transcendental — study of how we’re all too infinite to stay bottled up within ourselves. It’s a knowing smile of a drama that leaves you eager to follow Haugerud through his other two new films about the life of the mind, the last and best of which (“Dreams”) recently won top prize at the Berlinale. As that doctor tells the CEO when describing what it’s like for a woman to have intercourse at the same time as there’s a fully-developed fetus in her belly: “It’s amazing all the people your body can and has to accommodate.”
Grade: B
Strand Releasing will release “Sex” in select theaters on Friday, June 13.
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