Norwegian talkfest ‘Sex’ is an utterly unsexy film - review

We haven’t heard much about mumblecore recently, that indie film movement that features naturalistic, character-driven, dialogue-heavy stories. It more or less fizzled out over a decade ago after the release of such high-water marks of the genre as Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture and Joe Swanberg’s Drinking Buddies. But apparently, it’s alive and well in Norway, specifically in the movie Sex, directed by Dag Johan Haugerud, currently playing in theaters in Israel.

Given the movie’s title, you might expect that it features a lot of steamy scenes, but in true mumblecore form, it’s basically all talk. It’s mostly two-character scenes where the actors discuss their feelings about sexuality, mainly a sudden feeling that both male main characters have that they may be gay.

Both are chimney sweeps, a profession hardly seen on screen since Dick Van Dyke played Bert in Mary Poppins, which means they spend time on roofs in dark outfits, where these two married fathers sometimes sit and chat. The supervisor (Thorbjorn Harr) starts off the story in the breakroom one day when he tells his colleague, identified in the credits as Feier (Jan Gunnar Roise), or sweep, that he had a dream where he met David Bowie, they sang to each other, and he realized that Bowie was looking at him with lust and that he himself was a woman. You might think that would qualify as the most interesting thing anyone ever said in a breakroom, but Feier casually mentions that the day before, he had sex with a man for the first time in his life, one of the chimney cleaning company’s clients.

This gets the supervisor’s attention, and he asks some obvious questions, the answers to which aren’t so obvious. Feier says yes, he enjoyed it; no, he doesn’t think of himself as gay; and, startlingly, that he told his wife about it as soon as he got home. Even more startling is that he reports that she was fine with it. The supervisor is taken aback at all this, especially the part about the guy’s wife, and all he can say is that having sex with clients is not allowed. Feier promises it won’t happen again.

When Feier gets home, he is surprised to find his wife isn’t really fine. She is concerned about the cheating (her husband says it isn’t really cheating if it’s just sex and there is no relationship, a rather tired line), about the fact that he may be gay, and the feeling that she doesn’t know him as well as she thought she did. They talk some more.

Don't worry, there's side plots 

OTHER things happen. The supervisor’s son confides that he feels he is mediocre and will never be able to support himself unless he becomes a successful YouTuber. The supervisor prepares and takes part in a choir performance. Feier’s wife confides in a friend about his dalliance and begins writing in a journal about her feelings, which she shares with him. Feier has an anxiety attack over his feelings of guilt while atop a roof, and the supervisor has to help him down.

For the nearly two-hour running time, most of the movie feels as if you are overhearing actual conversations, which is both good and bad. It’s good in that the characters seem like real people, and you can guess why it’s bad: It gets boring very quickly. If you’ve ever taken part in an acting class where people are told to improvise, you know that the experience most likely gave you an enduring respect for screenwriters and playwrights. What people have to say, even about a subject as potentially interesting as sex, often isn’t that interesting. Some movies may have conversations that feel improvised and are entertaining, but it’s likely they were actually scripted, and if you compare them to real-life interactions, they move more smoothly and decisively. One example that comes to mind is Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculine Feminine, in which two long, seemingly completely natural conversations between two couples are the highlight of the film. The point is, it isn’t enough to make dialogue fl real. 

It has to tell a compelling story. Except for the opening scenes, Sex gets very dull very quickly. If you were sitting near these people on the bus and listening to them talk, you would soon go back to surfing the web or reading your book.