gasping for air
by Douglas Messerli
Dag Johan Haugerud (screenwriter and
director) Sex / 2024
Norwegian
director and screenwriter Dag Johan Haugerud’s first film of his 2024 trilogy, Sex,
is one of the finest films I have seen for ages. Those, however, interested in hyperkinetic
visuals and who are totally into action movies, might want to skip this film
and the others of Haugerud’s trilogy. For Haugerud’s movies belongs to a
tradition that is closer to some of the later films of Swedish director Ingmar
Bergman, The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes
from a Marriage or even in some respects a work like Swedish director Ruben
Östlund’s Force Majeure of 2014 than to most of contemporary cinema
works filled with special effects, mixes of genres, and bizarre twists of
narrative, and for that reason alone may seem a little “old-fashioned.”
These cinematic works and others like them are closer to the tradition
of dialogue fiction as exemplified in the writings mostly of 20th century British
writers such as Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, Ivy Compton-Burnett,
Norman Douglas, and Ronald Firbank, perhaps even the dramatist Harold Pinter,
and to a certain extent extended in the fictions of US writers as various as
Djuna Barnes, Eudora Welty,* and Guy Davenport. In these works, the focus is almost
entirely on the individual or a small group of individuals engaged in conversation,
and the drama exists in the ideas and the wit with which they express them, wit
in this case representing not simply an issue of “cleverness” but the keen
intelligence in which the ideas are explored. Yet, oddly these works are not at
primarily intellectual in their concerns, but focus on the everyday
interactions of its characters.
Moreover, these fictions and films are less concerned with broad complex
social or political issues, than they are with ordinary events surround love
and sexual interchange in relationship to the social situations in which their
central characters are related. Because of the intelligence in which these
issues are explored, in fact, it is often forgotten that at the center of such
works are issues of love, marriage, family, faithfulness, and, centrally, the
various inexplicable desires of the human heart expressed thourgh sex. The
conflict of these concerns is often what sets the drama of this genre in
motion.
That is not to say there nothing here of visual interest. Haugerud’s
camera is constantly at work in the background showing us the complete
transformation of the basically 19th-century provincial city of Oslo, one of
the largest cities in area in the world which in the 21st century has made it once
of the fastest growing cities in Europe. Throughout this movie, primarily focused
on the suburban areas of the mountainous capital, we see huge mechanical cranes
hovering over a landscape where urban muti-story buildings are being
constructed at a rate that is quite astounding. The Oslo I first visited in the
mid-1960s and again in the late 1990s no longer exists, as the city has changed
into a wealthy urban center which, from what I glimpse from the scenes in this
film, is one I no longer recognize.
Against this backdrop we are ironically presented with a group of men
whose job seemingly comes out of the 18th and 19th centuries. The film’s two
major figures are played by Jan Gunnar Røise and Thorbjørn Harr, both described
simply as chimney sweeps (which requires me to use the actors’ names to
represent their characters). In a city still very much kept warm by chimneys,
these two, with Harr being the boss of Røise’s character, dressed in attire
provided by the city, still climb the highest of rooves and check out the
conditions of apartment and single resident chimney’s, reporting back the
discovery of blockages, cracks, and crumblings to their clients who by
necessity must keep their chimneys working to keep warm in the long Norwegian
winters.
But on the particular day when this film begins, the two friends have
gathered during a break just to talk. They are fairly ordinary heterosexual men,
happily married with children and decent incomes living in a country that offers
them excellent health care, long vacations, and supportive social and religious
structures.
Yet something is troubling Thorbjørn Harr in form of his nightly dreams.
In the first of these dreams he finds himself in a public bathroom. When he
exits his cubicle he observes a handsome man washing his hands at the sink. The
man looks at him in the mirror and their eyes meet, the man, who he soon
perceives is David Bowie, saying: “If you as a human being have the capacity to
recognize goodness and beauty and be excited by it. If you have the capacity to
recognize injustice and act on it. If you have the capacity to recognize evil
and distance yourself from it.”
“He looked and me and said those words. At
first is was rather lovely. But then something changed and it felt dark and uncomfortable.”
When asked by his working partner, Røise, whether he is “into” Bowie,
the middle-aged Harr answers no, and he’s not even sure it was Bowie. “At first
I didn’t realize it was Bowie. I thought it was God.” He adds, in an almost
comical turn, “And then I thought it was Anni-Frid from ABBA. But then I
realized it was David Bowie.”
After a brief confusion of whether Bowie
was washing his hands or talking on the phone, he continues, “Then he looked
and me and smiled, and then he walked up to me….”
“And then you had sex?” interrupts
Røise.
Harr, looks at his friend, startled and somewhat surprised by the
question. No, he emphatically continues, “Why would you say that?” Harr smiles,
“But there was something about the look in his eyes. It was calm, firm,
friendly and full of compassion. It was like I could surrender all of my
worries and just….He was taking charge from here. And that felt so good.”
But then he realizes that he didn’t recognize the image of himself that
Bowie had in his eyes. “I felt as if he looked at me like I were a woman.”
Indeed, as Harr’s tale goes on, the issue of gender becomes even more
pronounced as he feels as if his voice has suddenly grown higher. He sings in a
church choral group which is soon having a concert in which he will perform a
solo, and singing to himself in the shower he feels his voice is not quite his
own.
In response to his boss’ openness, Røise himself admits to a recent
adventure of sorts, wherein, while visiting a client to tell him of the
problems with his chimney, that man asked him outright if he’d like to have
sex.
Startled by the question, the happily married, monogamous, heterosexual Røise
almost emphatically says no. But soon after he leaves, he feels a desperate
urge or curiosity, something he cannot quite explain, and returns to not only
have sex with the slightly older, not truly attractive man, but serves as a
bottom, admitting to some pain in the beginning, but in the end actually quite
enjoying the experience.
To Harr’s probes he declares he is not at all gay and has never before
thought about such a sexual encounter nor particularly wished for it. And no,
he does not desire to necessarily experience it again. It was just a momentary
urge which, all in all, he found quite pleasant.
Moreover, he doesn’t at all feel like he was cheating on his wife, since
he mentioned the event to her as soon as he returned home. It was a momentary
and apparently uncontrollable desire, nothing more or less, he insists.
Surprising, only because it was, all in all, a rather pleasant event.
These two tales are truly all the film is about, and were not they
shared with their less open-minded wives, the stories, strange and
out-of-the-ordinary as they may be might simply be something two heterosexual
men shared at a bar or in the swimming locker room at the pubic pool which both
of these men and other chimney sweeping friends also regularly attend. As two
male comrades, they promise to keep one another’s confessions to themselves.
But almost immediately family relations intrude. Harr’s son is having
some girlfriend problems, his young female friend having established her own Internet
Program on which she discusses her personal problems, which obviously involve
him as well. When Harr simply accompanies his son home from school, the two,
man and boy, are almost hijacked by two women who, seeing the healthy males
walk by, highjack them to help them carry a new refrigerator they have just bought
from their car to the elevator, from where their husbands will later move it to
their apartments. In the heavy moving, Harr’s son hurts his hand, later being
unable to even button his shirt, and requiring his father to take him to the
doctor.
Although Røise’s wife (Siri Forberg) has appeared, at first, to simply
accept the news of his “homosexual” encounter, by the following day she finds
herself alternately in tears and being so confused by her husband’s actions
that she hardly knows what to make of them. If he sees it simply as an unusual
incident, she most definitely views it as cheating, even though she later is reminded
that
when they first met one another she had sex with her ex (husband or boyfriend
is never revealed), as if, Røise points out, she might pick which one was best
in bed.
Besides, he argues sex is not the same as the
committed relationship he has with her, and the love he feels for her. Sorry,
that the almost arbitrary act has occurred, he even promises that he will never
give way to his momentary feelings again. But his wife, who has clearly read
her feminist theory 101, realizing that she does not own her husband in their
marriage any more than he controls her, painfully refuses to disallow any other
desires he may have in the future. Yet convention clearly weighs heavily upon
her.
Unable to even imagine sharing their bed, she determines to discuss the
matter with her friend Hanne, a woman whom Røise admits to Harr may not be one
of the most “open-minded” of individuals; moreover, a psychiatrist fried of
Hanne’s joins the lunch, suggesting to Forberg’s character that she regain “control
over the narrative” by keeping a journal.
Røise is not at all sure that he is
comfortable with his wife sharing his own experience with others, let alone
someone else controlling the narrative of something he himself cannot really
explain.
Harr’s wife (Birgitte Larsen) seems much
wiser and less perturbed by her husband’s dream than she is amused, assuring him
that she notices no change in his voice, and calming his fears of his now
losing his old skin, which might be simply psoriasis, she argues, which he
should check out when he takes his son to the doctors about his hand. She suggests
that her husband’s dream sounds just like midlife crisis.
When Harr’s son admits that he would like a tattoo, the doctor attempts
to dissuade him from desecrating his beautiful young body, a thing to behold in
itself, by telling him about two of her patients.
The doctor tells another strange dream-like story about two gay male
architects truly in love with one another. One loved the other most because of
the line of his shoulders over his back and the beauty he found in the shape.
The other, to celebrate his lover’s birthday, had the very spot his friend so treasured
tattooed with the name of the great architectural genius Frank Lloyd Wright.
While his lover attempted to smile and accept the gift with joy, it was clear
he did not at all appreciate what his companion had done to his own body,
particularly to the part of he had so much admired.
“What
happened to the couple?” the boy asks.
Well,
they did truly one love another, the doctor concludes, and the friend eventually
came to even admire the other’s attempt to give him something of his own self,
even though he never quite loved that arch of the shoulder to his back as much
he previously did. But, in a sense, it reminded him of his partner’s love for
him.
The doctor bandages Harr’s son’s hand and, when after some hesitation Harr
brings up the issue of his skin, she assures him that simply applying some
lotion will resolve the problem.
In the
end, both men’s dilemmas seem at least temporarily resolved when Røise and his
wife, neither of them being religious believers, nonetheless attend the church
concert at which Harr, dressed in a rather outlandish red shirt and shorts
hand-sewed and stitched by his son, sings his short solo in a truly contemporary
composition which affirms God’s plans to give “a future and a hope,” for those
of his flock who have stood against evil. In the end everyone appears to accept
themselves for the mess of conflicting feelings that define their very existence.
What
is so very fascinating with director Haugerud’s
approach to an open discussion of homosexual love and the transgender
experience is that he encapsulates the desires within the bodies of two very
heterosexual men, showing that even their exploration of and rational thoughts
about the issues cause all sorts of difficulties when brought before even a supposedly
loving and open-minded people represented here by their wives, friends, and
professionals. These two men, despite all the pressures on them to maintain
their masculine front, are both adventurous enough to explore, even if somewhat
unwilling and unknowingly, the lives of others which the society still pushes
to the borders of outsiderness. And in the process, the film also explores
issues of marriage, desire, love, and sex. Does marriage mean an abonnement of
all desire? Does heterosexual love automatically exclude all other forms of
identity and sex? Do straight males perhaps need to comprehend the desires of
others outside their dominant cis club? I have argued throughout these volumes
that film directors, writers, and producers, in creating their screen dreams
and fantasies have also needed to and felt compelled to explore the LGBTQ world
in order to understand the culture at large. If ever a film confirms my
argument, it is Haugerud’s Sex.
This 2024 film seems also almost poignantly prescient given the extremely
popular TV series Heated Rivalry applauded mainly by women because the
two very masculine sportsmen at the center of the work seek to understand their
own desires and love outside the standard confines of heterosexual marriage. It
is almost as if these chimney sweeper’s wives suddenly got together and
realized, as do Svetlana and Rose in Heated Rivalry, that sometimes men
need something other than their kind of love.
Røise’s strange experience also could not help but remind me of the
crucial moment in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples story “Music from
Spain,” in which the married heterosexual male Eugene McLain, living in San
Francisco, recognizes one morning his marital despair. In “Music from Spain”
Welty describes the conditions which lead him one morning to slap his wife
across the face and leave the house, unconsciously seeking and finding an
experience which will permit him again to share in myth. Emma, his wife, is
described as a woman with a historical sensibility. She is obsessed by the
death of her only child, Fan, and therefore is able to do very little in the
present except sit and talk with a neighbor. Eugene himself works at the job of
putting together clocks, at a job defined by clock time; waiting at the door is
the jeweler’s son, watching to see that no one arrives to work late. But on the
special morning, Eugene slips past him and comes across the Spanish guitarist
whom he and Emma had seen in the concert the night before (in one of their only
nights out since Fan’s death). Eugene saves the guitarist from being hit by an
automobile. Through that act a special kinship arises between the two of them,
and Eugene and the Spaniard wander together throughout the city all day without
being able to speak a word of each other’s language. In Welty’s almost hallucinogenic
work they do not have sex, but they do battle together, which surely symbolizes
the sexual act, the Spaniard, after, lifting him high and almost hurling him off
a cliff, sets him down again on solid ground, which ends in a sense of renewal,
in what Welty describes as a “vision—some niche of clarity, some future.”
In fact, these chimney sweepers daily scale the mountains of roof-tops,
climbing them with metal clamps almost as if one might be scaling a mountain. A
one point after fearing that his relationship might be over, Røise himself,
after climbing a roof peak finds himself dizzy, unable to even stand up. He
calls Harr to come help him as the two commiserate. He begins with an
observation about the people whose chimney he is inspecting. “People are so
strange. These people had covered their fireplace with wallpaper.” He then
admits to Harr that he and his wife have been talking all night.
Harr queries: “It wasn’t that easy after
all?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told her,” admits Røise.
“But that wouldn’t have felt right. Then it would feel like cheating.”
“At
least you know what you’re feeling,” answers Harr. Yet he chides him for being
a tad naïve, trying to do the impossible.
Yet
Røise stands his ground: “I haven’t tried to do anything.” Still, he feels as
if his whole world were unravelling.
“If it’s any consolation, you’re not the
only one.”
Røise
asks if he again dreamt he was a woman.
Harr responds: “Yes, well, not that I was a woman…that people look at me
as if I were a woman.” As in the earlier dream, David Bowie—we realize even if
he cannot that Bowie, in his bisexuality and performance of varying gender
roles almost has come to stand for transsexuality—is there. All the lads were
just laughing and joking. And David Bowie appears with someone else. “He spots
me across the room and comes over. He looks as if he is really happy to see me.
I stand up and give him a hug. And I can tell you all are impressed that I know
him. And he takes my hand and we walk out into something…green…and bright. And
as we’re walking it feels as if I were growing taller. He put his hand on my
back…and pushed me forwards. And I can feel something in my body, a lightness.
A possibility that….
He feels an uncomfortableness when he awakens, but Røise points out that
it really sounds nice.
“They’re
all nice things,” Harr agrees.
It’s clear from this and the former scene that at least these representatives
of the patriarchal world are ready to abandon their sense of superiority and
masculinity. Like so very many woman tired and disgusted of having to play an endless
role of weakness and incompetence, these men resent having to represent
heterosexual male behavior, and are not at all happy in the pretense of their
strength and power. Without any of Welty’s sense of myth and symbolism, Haugerud focuses
on two men just want to be nice blokes liked by those around them, loved maybe
just a little bit different from time to time than the marital roles the
society—the society they have helped make and control if you want to properly
describe it—demands of them. The two groups these men have chosen to psychically
embrace, homosexuality and transgenderism, is a vast imaginative leap which as
Harr describes it is “impossible,” but nonetheless temporarily desired just as
an imaginative way out. Their sexual outing and dreams offer them just what
Eugene McLain has discovered: “some niche of clarity, some future,” even if the
world around them cannot embrace their brief vision of a brave new world.
I might add that along with the constant visual reminders of the brave
new world into which Norway is transforming itself, the lyrical brass and drum
dominated fanfares of composer Peder Capjon Kjellsby’s score contributes a
great deal to the emotional effect of the story about these two urban mountaineers.
*I
would remind the reader of the close artistic and personal friendship between
Welty and Bowen.
Los Angeles, February 8, 2026
My Queer Cinema blog (February
2026).
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