‘Sex’ Review: Nordic Drama Digging Into Male Sexuality Is Provocative, Insightful and Entertaining
Had your fill of punishing investigations into toxic masculinity? Then the thoughtful questioning, sensitivity, low-key humor and refreshing candor of Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex might be your antidote. Turning the male character study on its head with a gentle subversiveness that recalls what The Worst Person in the World did with romantic comedy, this superbly acted drama’s refusal to serve up tidy epiphanies might leave you wanting more. But the inchoate nature of the central characters’ self-reflection is partly the point in a smart movie with a lot on its mind.
The first entry in a trilogy by the writer-director called Sex Dreams Love, it centers on two friends — both of them married and ostensibly heterosexual — who work for the same chimney-sweeping company. That profession might more readily conjure associations with Mary Poppins, but these guys are no jaunty jacks-of-all-trades. They are methodical professionals providing a specialized service in contemporary Oslo, each of them nudged in different ways to learn that their sexual identities are more amorphous than they ever suspected.
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While the predominant structure as a series of intimate, often extended two-character conversations full of sharp dialogue means Sex could almost work as a play, the film is also crisply cinematic. When not locked in tight scrutiny of the characters, DP Cecilie Semec’s camera hangs back to take in the bustle and severity of the city, with its tower blocks, construction sites and traffic snarls. Climbing up on a roof to clean a chimney can either broaden a person’s view or compound their isolation.
Neither the two men nor their wives are ever named in the film or its end credits crawl. We meet the guys via a sly bit of misdirection when Haugerud sets up the opening conversation like a therapy session.
Sitting at an office breakroom table with cars streaming by on a freeway through the window behind him, the company supervisor (Thorbjorn Harr) recounts a vividly detailed dream that caused him to wake in discomfort. A figure that he first thought might be God or Frida from Abba turns out to be David Bowie, who shares some basic tenets about the human capacity to recognize goodness and beauty on the plus side and injustice and evil on the negative. But what really stayed with him from the dream was the awareness that Bowie was looking at him as a woman.
When the frame eventually shifts to reveal his employee (Jan Gunnar Roise), there’s some dry amusement in the discovery that the supervisor isn’t even a Bowie fan. But the director never makes fun of the openness and honesty in these two men’s conversations, which are the heart of the film.
Even at their morning pool appointments to swim laps with a larger group, there’s no trace of “bro” bravado or awkwardness. Nor is there even the faintest whiff of gay panic when an out-of-the-blue disclosure causes the supervisor to look at his friend and colleague in a different light. Whether this is realistic or wish fulfillment is unimportant. All that matters is that it’s credible in the central relationship depicted here and the nuanced performances of both actors.
The employee follows the dream discussion by revealing that the previous day while on a job, he was chatting in the kitchen of a client, who looked him up and down approvingly and sexually propositioned him. The chimney sweeper laughed it off and left, but after stepping outside thought, “Why not?” So he went back in and was on the receiving end of some enjoyable afternoon delight. When his supervisor says he didn’t know he was gay, the staffer says “I’m not,” and we believe him.
He also shares that he went home and told his wife of 20 years (Siri Forberg), maintaining that he doesn’t regard the interlude as cheating because there’s no hiding or lying involved. She doesn’t quite see it that way, and while there are no hysterical arguments about infidelity, she can’t let it go the next day when he just wants to talk about plans for the garden or take their sons to dinner at Ikea. When she worries he might be gay, he says, “Having one beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic.”
One of the key parts of the experience is the husband’s admission that he was turned on by having a man look at him that way. Among the film’s more oddly touching impressions is that men want to feel desired, not in any swaggering horndog way but certainly in ways that don’t fit neatly into the boilerplate mold of husband and father. Still, he feels bad about the pain he caused his wife and assures her he has no intention of doing it again.
Meanwhile, the supervisor, who sings with a choir, is puzzled by a shift in his voice, sounding slightly higher and a little constricted. The group’s orchestra leader recommends a vocal coach (Nasrin Khusrawi), who helps loosen up his tongue, telling him the problem is likely in his head and stress-related. The Bowie dream becomes a recurring part of his sleep, but rather than waking up feeling uneasy, he begins to take pleasure in the sensation of being looked at as a woman.
There are a lot of layers both in Haugerud’s screenplay and in the two principal actors’ performances, subtly touching on the ways in which codes of masculinity have inhibited them, perhaps causing them to suppress parts of their nature, particularly in terms of their sexuality. Both seem to welcome a new sense of vulnerability, maybe even of a previously untapped feminine side that equates not with weakness but with personal freedom.
The film is laced with dry humor but also poignancy and notes of melancholy. That applies to a shift when the joy afforded the chimney sweeper by his liberating sexual encounter turns to shame, guilt and regret after discussing it with his startled wife. When she talks it through with people outside the marriage, someone advises her to write down her feelings as a means of maintaining control. The moving offshoot of that comes later when her husband expresses sadness to his supervisor that the story no longer feels like his.
More amusingly, he suggests to his supervisor that confessing to having slept with a man was probably easier for him than the latter admitting to being a Christian.
Haugerud’s screenplay deftly expands its thoughts on gender roles and expectations by observing the two men’s teenage sons, without ever becoming schematic.
The chimney sweeper’s eldest boy, Hans Petter (Hadrian Jenum Skaaland), gets into trouble at school for asking what other students’ parents earn. He also questions why two female strangers felt free to rope him and his dad into moving a refrigerator for them, then barely thanked them as they walked away, with Hans Petter nursing what turns out to be a significant injury.
The supervisor’s son Klaus (Theo Dahl) is insecure about his across-the-board Bs, fretting that mediocre grades will steer him into the life of an underachiever. He wants to start a YouTube channel like his influencer girlfriend, who shares videos on everything from makeup to menstrual cramps.
In one funny scene, Klaus sits working away — the image of a teenage boy at a sewing machine suggests a younger generation with fewer gender hangups — alongside his father and mother (Birgitt Larsen) while they discuss developments with the chimney sweeper. Only the slightest sideways glance from Klaus at one point indicates that the boy is even remotely interested.
The one element that feels borderline extraneous — though still quite entertaining — is a story related by a chirpy doctor (Anne Marie Ottersen). She tells Klaus and his father about a young gay architect and how his intoxication with the elegant lines of his partner’s back was compromised when the partner surprised him with a full shoulder-width tattoo tribute to his hero, Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s typical of the movie’s offbeat humor that one of the sticking points is the font in which the name is emblazoned.
Music figures throughout to shape the tone and oil the transitions by way of Peder Capjon Kjellsby’s languorously jazzy score, with its floating strains of pensive brass. But the loveliest element is the musical performance by the supervisor with his choir and orchestra group. He appears barefoot, wearing a billowing red smock and shorts made by Klaus, and leads the singers in a brief song of praise before they segue into a slow, sensual dance, all loose sways and caresses.
The camera picks up on the sexual magnetism of a young trumpeter, on what looks like mutual attraction between the supervisor and a fellow male dancer, and most of all, on the intensity — possibly tinged by happiness? — on the face of the chimney sweeper, watching in the audience with his family. It’s a moment entirely in character with a compassionate, nonjudgmental movie that never spells anything out, preferring to let us form our own impressions of these two men evolving in ways that surprise and maybe even delight them.
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