Sex (2024)

 

Dag Johan Haugerud: Sex (NO 2024) with Jan Gunnar Røise (a chimney sweep) and Thorbjørn Harr (his chief).

Love & Anarchy: the 37th Helsinki International Film Festival (HIFF).

NO 2024.

D: Dag Johan Haugerud

C: Thorbjørn Harr, Jan Gunnar Røise, Anne Marie Ottersen

Kielet: norja

Tekstitykset: englanti

125 min

Teema: Nordic Council Film Prize Nominees

Copy source: Norwegian Film Institute.

Yhteistyössä: Nordisk Film & TV Fond ; Svenska kulturfonden ; Suomalais-norjalainen kulttuurirahasto ; Föreningen Konstsamfundet r.f.

Viewed at Kinopalatsi 1, Helsinki, 20 Sep 2024

Susanna Puomio (HIFF 2024): "Lämmin, ihana, herkkä; näillä adjektiiveilla emme ehkä ole tottuneet kuvailemaan elokuvaa, jonka pääosissa on kaksi keski-ikäistä työmiestä. Juuri nuo sanat täsmäävät kuitenkin erinomaisesti norjalaisen Dag Johan Haugerudin uutukaiseen. Samalla kertaa arkinen ja oivaltava komedia vie paitsi tarinan päähenkilöt myös katsojat lempeän valoisasti sukupuoli- ja seksuaalisuuskysymysten äärelle."

"Elokuvan alkaessa kaksi nuohoojaa jakaa kahvitauolla kuulumisiaan. Ystävyksistä kumpikin on viime päivinä kokenut jotain, mikä koettelee nyt suhdetta minäkuvaan ja miehuuteen. Jotain on muuttumassa, mutta vasta keskustelujen kautta sen näkee. Ilman toisia yksilöt eivät osaa asettaa kokemuksiaan kontekstiin."

"Trilogian ensimmäisenä osana julkaistu Sex ei nimestään huolimatta sisällä alastomia kehoja tai kiihkoa. Sen polttopisteessä hehkuu puhe: dialogi, monologi, jutustelu, vitsailu, reflektio. Hahmot kysyvät toisiltaan asioita, joita meidän muidenkin pitäisi aina välillä pohtia. Auringon paistaessa puutarhat puhkeavat kukkaan ja pilvenpiirtäjät kasvavat. Samoissa hetkissä hahmojen käsitykset muuttavat muotoaan ja asettuvat uudelleen." Susanna Puomio

"This heart-warming comedy unpacks the questions of masculinity through the conversations and monologues of two middle-aged chimney sweeps and their families."

"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." David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

"Haugerud has announced this as this first of three films — Sex, Dreams, and then Love — featuring the same cast and dealing overall with themes of desire, identity and freedom, not to mention sexuality and the place of gender in our lives and society. This first stand-alone film also leans heavily into masculinity in ways it is not normally discussed by guys, but they do here in profound ways in this thought-provoking movie that also puts a spotlight on Norway’s signature city, Oslo."

"Haugerud’s dialogue-driven screenplay is full of monologues delivered in talky exchanges either with two male colleagues (neither ever identified by name) at a chimney sweep company and/or their wives." Pete Hammond, Deadline

AA: I missed Sex at Midnight Sun Film Festival where Dag Johan Haugerud was a guest. The great buzz about Sex and Haugerud's fantastic morning discussion hosted by Liselott Forsman made me look forward to this film.

There is no visible sex. This is a conversation film in a special current of the cinema, best known by Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre. 

What a thrill it is. Great dialogue and great actors (Jan Gunnar Røise / a chimney sweep and Thorbjørn Harr / his chief) are sufficient to carry Sex to constantly surprising depths and heights. Symbolically and literally the guys are chimney sweeps. They have no names, thus I refer to the names of the actors.

It follows organically from their profession that we are under a wide open sky and see magnificent panoramas of the city of Oslo. The private, the intimate and the personal are checked with a perspective that is general, grand and cosmic. Seagulls negotiate the airspace of Oslo in an unobtrusive imagery of freedom.

Sex starts with the interpretation of dreams. Thorbjørn, the fire chief who is a committed Christian, has a recurrent dream in which he meets a character who might be David Bowie. That character looks at Thorbjørn as if he were a woman. It is an unsettling but not distasteful feeling. The stranger sees Thorbjørn in a way in which he has never been looked at before. And in consequence he makes Thorbjørn see himself in another way. To be looked at without expectations. "He looked me at my core. I was free to be." God or Bowie?

Intrigued by Thorbjørn's story, Jan Gunnar makes a confession of his own about something that happened the day before. For the first time in his life, he had sex with a man. Why? Good question. He is not gay, and he did not come out. Jan Gunnar confesses immediately to his wife, who is bewildered. For Jan Gunnar it is no big deal, just something that happened. He was not cheating, because he is not having a secret affair on the side. But a marital crisis and a question of divorce ensues.

Distinctive in Sex is that it avoids stereotypes. Might this be a tale of midlife crisis? Or a revelation of the complexity of male sexual identity? Sigmund Freud thought that we are all born bisexual but usually settle on hetero- or homosexual identities after adolescence.

Common to Thorbjørn and Jan Gunnar is that neither is homosexual. Yet Jan Gunnar can experience a homosexual act as pleasurable and unshocking. Thorbjørn, the actor who has portrayed viking warriors, sees in his dream himself being looked at like a woman, and experiences that as strangely liberating. Both seek counsel to understand what is going on. 

There are even psychosomatic syndromes. Thorbjørn visits a female doctor with his son whose wrist needs to be bandaged. In the funniest sequence of the movie the doctor turns out to have an eccentric sense of humour. A discussion about tattoos leads to a digression in black and write about two romantic gay architects and their tattoo mix-up. The doctor recommends Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition. The dream catcher can go.