‘Sex’ Review: Two Men Talk About and Around the Subject

The two men who circle each other in the serious, deliberate Norwegian talkathon “Sex” chat about different things, including life, love, desire, freedom and fidelity. Their discussions are searching, at times surprisingly intimate — especially for male characters — sometimes naturalistic and often sufficiently self-consciously mannered to make you aware of just how written the material is. At once specific and general, the story charts the lives of these two, who while they appear contentedly married to women, are each experiencing difficulties that, for all their words, neither can fully articulate, including to themselves.

The men are colleagues in Oslo, which is never identified in the movie. They and their wives are similarly unnamed, although a smattering of other characters do have proper names. The men work as chimney sweeps, a strikingly novel profession, at least in American cinema; the only other one who comes easily to mind is Dick Van Dyke’s sooty charmer in the original “Mary Poppins.” At one point, the men in “Sex” sit on a roof together after one suffers a dizzy spell, but they simply talk and talk some more. The only fires that they seem to be trying to prevent are their own.

“Sex” is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting. Its strengths are the largely appealing performances from the two principals, Jan Gunnar Roise (called “sweep” in the end credits) and Thorbjorn Harr (“department head”). Tall and lean, with a blond mustache to match his hair, Harr’s character is thoughtful, interested and religious. He’s also a committed, solicitous father to his only child, Klaus (Theo Dahl), a sweet teenager. His wife (billed as “social worker” and played by Birgitte Larsen) is a secondary character who registers as an afterthought.

The movie’s first long conversation begins during some place-setting images of Oslo, with geometric shots of buildings, sweeps working on roofs and cars zipping on a freeway. As if tethered to a drone, the camera drops down and pushes toward a building window that frames two obscured figures. Inside, Harr’s character is telling Roise’s about a recent, unsettling, if amusing dream. David Bowie, he explains while seated before the window, appeared to him with some gnomic utterances, starting with the mysteriously fragmentary: “If you, as a human being, have the capacity to recognize goodness and beauty, and be excited by it.”

It’s fuzzy which iteration of Bowie (Ziggy Stardust? The Thin White Duke?) graced the department head’s dreams. He isn’t a fan, and he isn’t entirely sure, he admits, if it was even the musician. “I thought it was God,” he says (a fair assumption). As he continues talking, he explains that what made the dream so unsettling for him was that Bowie looked at Harr’s character as if he were a woman. The other man, the sweep, asks if the dream was sexual. It wasn’t, but shortly thereafter, the camera pans to the sweep, who tells his colleague that the day before, he had sex with a man for the first time. And then, the sweep says, he told his wife.