Oslo Stories Trilogy: Sex review - sexual identity slips, hurts and heals

Two chimney sweeps sit by a window. The boss (Thorbjørn Harr) recounts a dream meeting with David Bowie, who disconcertingly looks at him like he’s a woman. Funny thing, his friend (Jar Gunnar Røise) replies. Yesterday, a male client asked him to have sex, and he did. It felt good. He hasn’t told anyone else, apart from his wife.

Sex opened Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy in Norway, and closes it here, forming an appropriate climax to his distinctive MO. The nameless sweeps’ 15-minute break-room conversation at its start, panning from widescreen one-shot to two-shot with sometimes comic timing, mixes naturalism and a shaggy dog story in its slow-burn discursion. Where Dreams broke the critical taboo on voiceovers with its epic opening monologue, Sex stretches coolly observed conversation, made cinematic by the nuanced movement of bodies and their frame, from neat domestic trappings to the sweeps’ work among the cranes of an Oslo being busily remade, noisome with urban pressures. The exchanged ideas’ rebel nature is another trilogy constant, as sexuality and sexual identity are teased apart. “Having one beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic,” the straight sweep says of gay sex. In a time of polarised sexual absolutes, Haugerud’s admittedly utopian films respond by disarming. Dismantling the border posts, he sets his people free.

Harr and Røise are Haugerud rep company regulars, notably in Beware of Children (2019), when Harr’s grieving but harsh right-wing politician savaged Røise’s dreamily liberal teacher. They form a tender double-act here. The boss’s heroic effort to receive the sweep’s bombshell as casually as it’s delivered, and the sweep’s obtuse underestimate of its impact, reflected in his casual blocking of the break-room fridge, is a lovely comic dance of expression and movement.

The sweep’s wife (Siri Forberg, above right with Røise) is less sanguine about her husband’s transgression, distraught at the intimacies he’s shared: “Take your face when you’re coming. You look so vulnerable.” Was his arse sore, she wonders, repeating the boss’s typical straight fear, as their son saunters in from school. This marital breakdown becomes the trilogy’s most painful episode, but in a triumph of Norwegian reason, no one shouts.

Sex satirises as well as celebrates Norway’s liberal intellectual dream. The boss’s sang-froid is sorely tested keeping up with philosophical bombardment from every quarter: the singing teacher who quotes Hannah Arendt as she manipulates his tongue, and a doctor’s lecture on Goddess theory and periods to his 13-year-old son, an early victim of Norway’s rat-race prematurely fearing mediocrity, and death. “One day you will die,” Dad reassures him with Haugerud’s sweet, mild truthfulness. “But on all the others you will not.”

Harr’s character and his wife (Birgitte Larsen, above right with Harr) are both Christian, an admission Røise’s sweep recalls as braver than saying he’s gay. As with the rapturous understanding of Oslo’s waterfront statuary as Christ’s blessing on omnisexual Oslo in Love, Christianity here is Christ-like. “I don’t think Jesus came to Earth to protect the nuclear family or to police people’s love lives,” Harr’s sweep tells Røise’s. Haugerud told me recently that, though he lost his own faith long ago, he retains friends in a former Christian community, and wished to balance recent cinema’s “predatory” characterisations: “There are a lot of sensible, good-thinking Christian people around, and we also need to show that.” Traces of Christ’s testing moral essence, he acknowledged, remain in his thinking. It’s finally reflected in Harr’s character’s slinky hot pant-wearing disco song and dance to divine acceptance of his feminine side.

It's that essential kindness, a soft though realistic heart also reflected in cinematographer Cecilie Semec’s blissful summer light, which adds a visionary element to this quietly beautiful trilogy.

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