Writer and Director: Dag Johan Haugerud
What constitutes cheating is a question that has troubled reality show contestants for years as storylines revolve around flirting, social media and text messaging as well as a spectrum of physical contact. For Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud, in new film Sex showing at the BFI London Film Festival 2024, one of his leads insists random sex with a man outside of a heterosexual marriage doesn’t count because the meaninglessness of the act renders it beyond the emotional intimacy with his wife. Naturally, she disagrees. Haugerud asks the viewer not only how you define cheating but what you would do in their place.
It is a racy world for chimney sweeps in Sex when before the film starts, lead character Feier (Jan Gunnar Røise) has had a chance encounter with a male client which led to full sex. The viewer arrives the next day as Feier tells his colleague Avdelingsleder (Thorbjørn Harr), a Christian who is currently troubled by dreams in which he encounters David Bowie – or it may be God – who looks at him as though he were a woman. And so begins a philosophical drama included in the Love strand exploring two separate family dynamics.
The first thing to point out about Sex is that there is none, this is a film about talking, processing and understanding often without drawing any conclusions. In many ways it ends where it begins with both narratives leading their characters through some difficult conversations and strange realisations without giving them any directive purpose. And for a story that takes place over just a handful of days that is a realistic outcome when big questions of betrayal, shifty linguistic developments and gender identification are only starting to be considered.
These are both family focused strands with Haugerud’s consideration of cheating, sex and sexuality a much more considered part of the film as husband and wife look at the evolving aspects of the incident alongside their daily demands including getting their children to school, going to work and meeting friends which cause their conversations to be continually disrupted. When they do speak, there are interesting thoughts about the relative size and effect of this experience, contrasting hurt and factual retelling with theoretical reflections on the nature of desire. And while Feier claims that sexual attraction can be controlled, he never explains why he chose not to do so when offered sex by this customer.
The second segment of the film is far more abstract and while Avdelingsleder speaks several times about his dream and the feeling of being seen differently, the concept never develops beyond this. A circular narrative that doesn’t touch on any of the topics you think it might – body dysmorphia, mental health or even the psychological interpretation of dreams – this aspect of Haugerud’s film feels like a separate idea, entirely possibly a separate film. There is value in the conversations between colleagues but Avdelingsleder’s faith only lightly features so could be better integrated into the core notions of human and spiritual temptation that Sex explores.
In the end, like all of those reality show performers, these characters realise that the impact of cheating is not in the definition but in the hurt and distress it causes to the person you cheat on, and the very real difference it makes to the relationship thereafter.
Sex is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
