We know Scandinavians are good at noir, and furniture. But what about introspective conversations on our roles in modern society, particularly as defined by gender, that run the entire length of the movie, and are no less absorbing because of it?

That was, in many ways, the mode of Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure, as the Swedish director and his characters dissected a hotly debated event – the cowardly reaction of a father fleeing an avalanche at a ski resort, leaving his family behind – across multiple venues over the course of the movie. We were glued to our seats.

Shift over one country to Norway, and writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud is giving us something in a similar vein, following two chimney inspectors going through related but different life crises, and talking about them in among themselves and their partners for nearly two hours. Again, you’ll be wiping the glue off your derriere when you’re done.

Perhaps the title of this film, Sex, explains why we’re so hooked on what they’re saying. In a vacuum, Haugerud’s ostentatious title might seem too cheeky by half, his movie not nearly titillating enough to warrant it. But it’s only a third of a trio of films the director has released during a short period of time, the others of which are also playing at MIFF. They’re called Dreams and Love, and if they are half as insightful as this film, it’s probably worth catching all three.

Sex lays out everything you need to know about these two characters in the first ten minutes, while beginning trajectories for them that require no high-concept digressions. The men are both unnamed, but they are the manager and his employee, though they interact as equals. The manager (Thorbjorn Harr) tells his employee that he’s been having dreams where David Bowie is looking at him with a beatific love that he’s never seen before, as though he were looking at a woman. The employee (Jan Gunnar Roise) does him one better, reporting that yesterday, he had impromptu sex with another man.

The story – which comes to involve their partners, and their partners’ reactions to the men’s forthright confessions of what they’re going through – is not really about these men actually possibly being trans, or actually possibly being gay. It’s more about assumptions that we have about identity, personal freedom, commitment to a partner, and the decision to indulge or not indulge in whims, when they may be damaging in nature to your life. However, that also makes Sex sound a lot more serious than it is. Haugerud’s film is uproariously funny when it wants to be.

What’s so comforting about it is how gentle it is. The employee’s wife (Siri Forberg) is not as happy about this confession as he naively believes she’ll be. But it is in fact naivete, not cruelty, that causes him both to engage in the tryst, and to tell her about it. He imagines he’s enlightened enough that it doesn’t matter, and because he’s secure in his heterosexuality and his happy marriage, it’s little more than an experiment. Of course it isn’t so free of consequence for her, though she also wishes she were above jealousies and possessiveness she believes to be petty – even as she realises she has every right to them, by the standards of even a progressive society.

In the other story, the manager is having quite the whimsical time with his son (Theo Dahl), a wise-beyond-his-years teenager who seems incapable of getting up to mischief, and his Christian wife (Birgitte Larsen), who is quite progressive in her own way despite that defining attribute that so often narrows the scope of a character. He continues to be pleasantly tormented by David Bowie, and even begins to physically manifest some of what’s going on during his slumber.

If you were told that you were going to be plopped down in front of these characters for two hours, observing only very slight growth in their understanding of the world, you might imagine you’d be bored. But this is a thoughtful and thought-provoking movie, precisely because it doesn’t try very hard to be the latter, earning it through the naturalism of its performances and dialogue. All of this is conveyed with great delicacy yet great matter-of-factness. There are no villains, no judges, only real people trying to make sense of themselves and of the sudden shakeup to their normal existence.

 

Sex has one more MIFF session on Saturday, August 23^rd at 1:15 p.m. at Cinema Kino, while the other two films in the trilogy, Dreams and Love, play straight after it, if you want to catch all three. Tickets can be purchased here.