Dag Johan Haugerud’s approach to dialogue — in which two privately rapt characters waffle between a listener’s patience and a preening sense of self-regard — does not, in and of itself, doom his trilogy project. Sex, which preceded Love and Dreams on the festival circuit, but is being released as the second entry (perhaps so as not to scare off curious filmgoers from the series), isn’t failed by the quality of its talk, but by its simplistic structure and perspective.
The film’s opening 15-minute scene, the camera hardly moving or cutting, shows two unnamed men, both working in the trade of furnace and chimney maintenance, as they tell each other about a destabilizing experience they have recently had — a hookup and a dream. This approach, which renders the film’s title as a bit of willfully evasive bait, remains constant through every scene set up in the film. Sex is ultimately concerned with, or perhaps unknowingly chases the high of, how there is often nothing more dull or one-sided than a “conversation” in which a speaker unskillfully indulges in the details of fantasy.
Both men here are married to women. Whereas the characters in Haugerud’s Love were united in their playful exploration of being uncommitted, Sex’s twin stories implicate and twist long-term relationship attachments, this opening dialogue acting similarly to the emotional landmines in films like Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet or Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure. That is, once spoken, there is no taking back these words, nor fully (or even halfway) restoring trust. (This open dialogue between colleagues is followed by each man confessing the same story to their respective partners.) The rest of the film tracks the men as they fail to achieve the bliss of their supposed breakthroughs and watch domestic stability slip away.
It’s admittedly a solid setup, but Haugerud wastes it. Whereas the aforementioned films by Loktev and Östlund present a crisis action that reveals character, and that action is then re-interpreted and dissected, Haugerud’s film lives only in pedantic analysis of the meanings (and ambiguities) of words. Clearly, these men want something they don’t have. But when they are accused of cheating, or asked whether they understand the substance of what they’ve said, Haugerud treats us to endlessly circular dialogue scenes that contain neither burning passion nor icy distance. We get the fussy scene presentation of a director in love with his own banalities (about honesty, the influence of others, and freedom), unwilling to commit to stakes that might push the film beyond its mode of self-analysis.
Haugerud’s conceptual trilogy is built on an idea of modern development — the series exists because there might be something new to say (or capture in speech) about love and relationships as they are experienced now. But Sex is rooted in its specific male neuroses: one man’s dream is that he exists as a woman (he claims not to be trans), and the other man’s encounter happens on the job with a male customer (he claims not to be gay). Neither believes that their desires are constant — it is as if they have experienced a temporary fugue that they cannot integrate into the rest of their waking life. Haugerud chooses to take this socio-psychological problem of denial or difference and filter it into bizarrely contextless conflicts.
Haugerud might be the anti-Mike Leigh: his actors seem to have experienced no actual lived history, cannot inflect dialogue with any particular flavour, and are pulled toward endings that deflate the potential of the scenes we are slowly made to understand will have no serious development or consequence. Sex’s ending completes just one conversational thread: that apparently in modern Norway, it can be considered a greater obstacle to come out as Christian than to come out as queer — this is a commendation shared from one man to the other, and inflects the clearest contrast between the two couples. One, the believer, eventually listens to his wife (and, in the climax, sings); the other doesn’t.
To make a social portrait of unspoken grievances, approach them via placid definitional hair-splitting, and finally offer little else than a quasi-mystic choir performance suggests that, as with the film’s aesthetic conservatism, Haugerud’s decision to approach modern love is a confused first draft. While it may be that the third film, the Todd Haynes-anointed Dreams, breaks this schema, Sex suggests this trilogy might be little more than a reaction to problems that can infinitely produce discourse and meagre advice, rather than a personally involved accounting of how romantic deviation from the traditional couple — whether dreamed or chanced — runs up against the disinterested perspective of societal norms.
The concept that neither men can relinquish, the reason they run their selfish risks, is that in their brief experiences they claim to have beheld something they’ve never previously experienced: a true Look of Love. Daugerud never depicts or even suggests this ideal outside of language, which charitably could be called an enormous challenge for the filmmaker. Perhaps it is bold to withhold a perspectival foothold, and to show characters and their grasping, their flawed ideals, their inaction, at such great length. But this is not consequential territory; the film’s large quantity of dialogue and pauses act as an alibi for only so much abstract dithering.
DIRECTOR: Dag Johan Haugerud; CAST: Jan Gunnar Røise, Thorbjørn Harr, Siri Forberg, Birgitte Larsen ; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: June 13; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 5 min.
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