The two men who circle each other in the serious, deliberate Norwegian talkathon “Sex” chat about different things, including life, love, desire, freedom and fidelity. Their discussions are searching, at times surprisingly intimate — especially for male characters — sometimes naturalistic and often sufficiently self-consciously mannered to make you aware of just how written the material is. At once specific and general, the story charts the lives of these two, who while they appear contentedly married to women, are each experiencing difficulties that, for all their words, neither can fully articulate, including to themselves.
The men are colleagues in Oslo, which is never identified in the movie. They and their wives are similarly unnamed, although a smattering of other characters do have proper names. The men work as chimney sweeps, a strikingly novel profession, at least in American cinema; the only other one who comes easily to mind is Dick Van Dyke’s sooty charmer in the original “Mary Poppins.” At one point, the men in “Sex” sit on a roof together after one suffers a dizzy spell, but they simply talk and talk some more. The only fires that they seem to be trying to prevent are their own.
“Sex” is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting. Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals, Jan Gunnar Roise (called “sweep” in the end credits) and Thorbjorn Harr (“department head”). Tall and lean, with a blond mustache to match his hair, Harr’s character is thoughtful, interested and religious. He’s also a committed, solicitous father to his only child, Klaus (Theo Dahl), a sweet teenager. His wife (billed as “social worker” and played by Birgitte Larsen) is a secondary character who registers as an afterthought.
The movie’s first long conversation begins during some place-setting images of Oslo, with geometric shots of buildings, sweeps working on roofs and cars zipping on a freeway. As if tethered to a drone, the camera drops down and pushes toward a building window that frames two obscured figures. Inside, Harr’s character is telling Roise’s about a recent, unsettling, if amusing dream. David Bowie, he explains while seated before the window, appeared to him with some gnomic utterances, starting with the mysteriously fragmentary: “If you, as a human being, have the capacity to recognize goodness and beauty, and be excited by it.”
It’s fuzzy which iteration of Bowie (Ziggy Stardust? The Thin White Duke?) graced the department head’s dreams. He isn’t a fan, and he isn’t entirely sure, he admits, if it was even the musician. “I thought it was God,” he says (a fair assumption). As he continues talking, he explains that what made the dream so unsettling for him was that Bowie looked at Harr’s character as if he were a woman. The other man, the sweep, asks if the dream was sexual. It wasn’t, but shortly thereafter, the camera pans to the sweep, who tells his colleague that the day before, he had sex with a man for the first time. And then, the sweep says, he told his wife.
By the end of this information-packed, spatially compressed, roughly 16-minute sequence, the writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud has introduced his main characters, who have a lot on their minds, as well as his themes and often confining and at times awkwardly stylized visual approach (off-kilter blocking and so on). It’s the strongest interlude in the movie. For the rest of “Sex,” Haugerud toggles between the sweep and the department head as they go about their lives, which emerge in more talks with each other, as well as with family members and several experts whom Harr’s character consults about some physical issues. He seems happy, but he’s troubled, and unease has settled into his body, much like Bowie’s words did.
Despite Roise’s open, sympathetic performance and his ability to convincingly put across emotional distress, the sweep proves a less successful character than Harr’s. Each man turns out to be struggling with varying degrees of distress with something — masculinity, heterosexuality, heteronormativity or maybe just drab buildings and dreary lives — that neither can admit to and seem finally helpless to comprehend. That’s tragic, perhaps; it’s also human. Certainly it’s clearer to you than to them that masculinity is on Haugerud’s mind, although what precisely the filmmaker wants to say about sex, gender, identity, desire and norms is something that he leaves for the viewer to puzzle through.
“Sex” is part of a thematically linked trilogy that Haugerud directed, and which has been warmly received on the festival circuit. It’s less successful than “Love,” which was released earlier this year, and focuses on another set of (named) men and women, who are far more richly realized. (The third movie, “Dreams,” opens later in the year.) Among other things, the lack of names in “Sex” suggests that its characters are universal types. That’s a choice, and an ungenerous one. Because while the wives, like their husbands, are identified by professions, the women’s titles also describe how they behave toward the men, including the sweep’s unhappy, aggressively needling spouse, who’s played by Siri Forberg and billed as “auditor.”
Sex
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
The post ‘Sex’ Review: Two Men Talk About and Around the Subject appeared first on New York Times.
