‘Sex’ Review: Dag Johan Haugerud’s Funny, If Digressive, Look at Male Sexuality

Like Ingmar Bergman, Éric Rohmer, and Hong Sang-soo before him, Dag Johan Haugerud believes in the niceties of conversation. Sex, one third of the writer-director’s Oslo Stories trilogy, largely consists of dialogue-driven scenes across which his characters reveal their desires and emotions. If the style of these long, mostly static scenes isn’t exactly novel, it nevertheless indicates how Haugerud aligns his work within a certain arthouse tradition, which pays modest dividends throughout the film’s two-hour runtime.

Early on, an unnamed, middle-aged man (Jan Gunnar Røise) sits off screen, listening as his boss (Thorbjørn Harr), also unnamed and middle-aged, discusses a dream in which he encounters David Bowie, who mistakes him for a woman. “He was taking charge from there. And that felt so good,” the man says. But, he adds, the dream didn’t end in sex. Then, as the camera pulls back and pans right, the other man comes into view and says, “I had sex with a man yesterday.”

This admission startles the boss, not least because it’s revealed that the person the man had sex with was a client. This sex act becomes a source of much debate and thought, especially once the man returns home and begins discussing it with his wife (Siri Forberg). From there, Haugerud explores in serio-comic fashion the repercussions of a married, self-avowed straight man in a monogamous relationship with a woman having a one-night stand with another man.

Part of Haugerud’s sly craft involves having these characters obsess over the minutiae of one sexual encounter, rewriting each other’s words and transforming sex into something to be studied, narrativized, and ultimately inflated into a symbol for an entire relationship. While the husband outrageously claims that his indiscretion wasn’t a big deal (“Having one beer doesn’t make you an alcoholic,” he says with a straight face), the wife justifiably can’t let it go, and she wants more details on exactly what happened. When the husband explains that this anonymous man “took me from behind,” she puts it in blunter terms: “He fucked you in the ass?”

One may wish that Sex was exclusively about this couple, as their struggle to reconcile whether or not five minutes of anonymous sex defines their relationship is far more compelling, and funny, than the boss’s dilemma about what his dreams of David Bowie may say about his sexuality. He discusses it with his wife (Birgitte Larsen), who struggles to even comprehend why the dreams are so troubling to him. Between the man laying out that Bowie doesn’t look at him as either a woman or a man, his earlier admission of feeling embarrassed to be seen with his wife when she was pregnant because that meant onlookers would know that they had sex, and a series of dramatically inert conversations that he has with his teenage son (Theo Dahl), it’s generally unclear what Haugerud is trying to say about him.

Perhaps the answer lies in Oslo itself. When not confined to apartments or offices, Sex relishes in capturing the city in wide, bright compositions, depicting the gentle hustle and bustle of such a well-kempt urban milieu. Notably, the two unnamed male protagonists are in the business of sweeping chimneys. While this works as a funny and unexpected correlate for anal sex, it’s also a reflection on how the cleanliness of public space doesn’t necessarily mean everything is in order. Whether the characters in Sex are meant to be understood as victims of a society that isn’t as progressive as it might seem is unclear, but the film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.