A tender and gently investigative Norwegian drama about a pair of Oslo chimneys whose life changes forever when they temporarily open up to each other between jobs one morning, Dag Johan HaugerudS “Six“-The independent first part of the director’s Kieślowski-inspired” sex, love, dreams “trilogy is far from the predicted spectacle promised by its title. In fact, this sweet and chat filmwhere sex is often discussed but never depicted, could just as easily have been called “love” or “Dreams“(That it doesn’t seem like a joke typical of Haugerud’s dry humor).
But it is not to accuse the head of a bite and switch. As Oscar Wilde is quoted for saying: “Everything is about sex except sex.” In that sentence, “Six“Is more about sex than it could ever have been if it contained any gender. While” sex “can be easy on the act itself, the movie is deep – Almost Spiritual – Engaged in what it means to people and why it plays such a big role in the way we self -identify and see each other.
“Sex” is a story about the parts of ourselves that we decide to share with each other, and even more a story about the vulnerability to share them. It starts with the higher ranked by the sweeps of the two chimney (the handsome Thorbjørn Harr, whose robust father aesthetic illuminates his character’s youthful naivety) who spoke Hans in the same way as was not mentioned subordinate (Jan Gunnar Røise) through a dream he had the previous night, where a Dal may not have been a Dali who may not have been a goddess who may not have been a Dali who had been a Dalie who may have been a Dalie who had been a Dali, which was a Dalie that may not have been a Dalie where a Dalie was a Dalie. Lust is familiar to a straight man who CEO (As he is referred to in the credits), but the feeling of wishing is difficult enough to maintain their mysteries.
What inspires the CEO to share this information with his colleague? Maybe he just had to hear how it sounded loud (“It’s strange how dreams change when you start talking about them,” he notes). We really get the impression that it is a radical rate of pace to the usual conversations between these men, as Haugerud’s sterile, interrogative framing suggests are more focused on avoiding emotions than sharing them.
But Røise’s character, whose usual behavior hides the potential wealth in his inner life, is anxious to make the most of the strange new energy that his boss has created. As in order to put the CEO in a simple way, he expects an unexpected confession of his own: he had sex with a male customer daily. He insists that he is not gay (“Having a beer does not make anyone an alcoholic” says the man but the hint of defense, and predicts a movie where homosexual calls are a freight invitation for self -understanding rather than something to be exorced or subject to), but, much like what happened in the boss, “he was the fact that he was active.
Another type of film may have used that opportunity to get a furtive romance between the two men, but “sex” is more interested in seeing how these men – especially underling – process their feelings on their own time. Røise’s Chimney Sweep immediately tells his wife (Siri Forberg, introduced in a long -term hiding her face from vision) about the meeting, provided she will be as confused by what he is. He is right about it, but wrong to believe that his wife will share the feeling that his improvised tryst was some kind of foreign event – a spontaneous that happens so by nature that it could just as much happened to someone else.
It is not the act that upsets her as much as the intimacy he experienced without her; She attributes Milan’s opinion that sex is rooted in a mutually shared mystery, and after 20 years of marriage she opposes the idea that someone else knows what her husband’s face looks like when he comes. Stored and wounded but never frightening or judgment, she initially demands that he fill in her imagination (how did they arrange their bodies? Was his ass sore?), To later confront himself with the idea of loving someone may require her to release them.
Her husband swears that he has no interest in repeating the experience, but his insistence further aggravates the woman’s questions – often pained, but never shouted or flashy – about why and how we limit ourselves to accommodate each other. What motivates people to share their secrets and what right has married partners to keep any part of themselves to themselves?
The last question is particularly big during a movie that loves their characters for their anxious curiosity and rejoices from being freed from the burden of having to draw their own conclusions to solve a clear plot. Equipped with the flushed ambivalence at Peder Capjon Kjellsby’s jazz fusion points, “Sex” makes it clear from the beginning that Haugerud sees the film’s various discussions as the reason to do so in the first place, and not as a means to an end; He couldn’t care less if the chimney is sweeping and his wife differs in the end, but he is fascinated by how the emotional man becomes when his wife reveals that she will discuss the situation with one of her friends. “You do your Story, “he cries, as if it were a greater storage room than cheating on her. As if love itself was not a desperately beautiful effort to create something greater than our bodies.
“Six” is Her story, of course. It is also – in a more literal way – also the CEO’s story, since the film is almost equally involved in his efforts to know his dream, whose effects adopt a concrete dimension when the CEO begins to feel his voice changes during the days until a concert reason.
That document and its enclosed digression on the CEO’s teenage son cannot help but feel a little unformed in comparison to his colleague’s marital problems, but there is a rushing joy in Harr’s performance as a conservative man who finds out for the first time in his life, and the roar is supplemented by the summer heat in Cecilie Semac. You can almost feel that the CEO that peels away a tan when he throws a layer of dead skin, and his newfound openness allows Haugerud to use him as a lead for the different thoughts that “sex” is wearing.
The CEO’s journey is much more private than his co -worker (no one wants to hear about someone else’s dreams, and he has to ask his own wife to care about it with Bowie), but it also welcomes so many other people in the conversation at the same time. These people include a music teacher who lectures him at Hannah Arendt, and a very exaggerated doctor who ruminates about the feeling of having sex during the third trimester of a pregnancy and tells the CEO a long story about a patient from her who once made the mistake of getting a massive tattoo in tribute to her partner.
On their own, these sections do not amount to so much, but “sex” puts them in with the chimney’s sweep dilemma to make more and more effect on the effect, as Haugerud utilizes the usual range of heteronormative mangups to a applicant rumor about the vulnerability to share the many we contain. This is not a movie that is for or against monogamy, as much as it is a touching – and during the last minutes, even vague transcendental – studies of how we are too endless to stay bottled in ourselves. It is a knowing smile of a drama that leaves you anxious to follow Haugerud through his other two new films about the life of the mind, the last and the best (“Dreams”) recently won the top prize on Berlinale. As that doctor tells the CEO when he describes how it is for a woman to have intercourse while there is a fully developed fetus in the stomach: “It is fantastic all people that your body can and must accommodate.”
Rating: B.
Strand Release releases “Sex” in selected theaters on Friday, June 13.
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