Provocative Nordic Drama Digs Into Male Sexuality – The Hollywood Reporter

Jan Gunnar Roise (left) and Thorbjorn Harr in ‘Intercourse’

Motlys

Had your fill of punishing investigations into poisonous masculinity? Then the considerate questioning, sensitivity, low-key humor and refreshing candor of Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Intercourse is perhaps your antidote. Turning the male character research on its head with a mild subversiveness that recollects what The Worst Particular person within the World did with romantic comedy, this fantastically acted drama’s refusal to serve up tidy epiphanies may go away you wanting extra. However the inchoate nature of the central characters’ self-reflection is partly the purpose in a wise film with lots on its thoughts.

The primary entry in a trilogy by the writer-director known as Intercourse Desires Love, it facilities on two associates — each of them married and ostensibly heterosexual — who work for a similar chimney-sweeping firm. That occupation may extra readily conjure associations with Mary Poppins, however these guys aren’t any jaunty jacks-of-all-trades. They’re methodical professionals offering a specialised service in modern Oslo, every of them nudged in several methods to study that their sexual identities are extra amorphous than they ever suspected.

Whereas the predominant construction as a sequence of intimate, usually prolonged two-character conversations stuffed with sharp dialogue means Intercourse might nearly work as a play, the movie can be crisply cinematic. When not locked in tight scrutiny of the characters, DP Cecilie Semec’s digicam hangs again to absorb the bustle and severity of town, with its tower blocks, building websites and site visitors snarls. Climbing up on a roof to scrub a chimney can both broaden an individual’s view or compound their isolation.

Neither the 2 males nor their wives are ever named within the movie or its finish credit crawl. We meet the fellows by way of a sly little bit of misdirection when Haugerud units up the opening dialog like a remedy session.

Sitting at an workplace breakroom desk with automobiles streaming by on a freeway by the window behind him, the corporate supervisor (Thorbjorn Harr) recounts a vividly detailed dream that prompted him to wake in discomfort. A determine that he first thought is perhaps God or Frida from Abba seems to be David Bowie, who shares some primary tenets in regards to the human capability to acknowledge goodness and sweetness on the plus facet and injustice and evil on the damaging. However what actually stayed with him from the dream was the attention that Bowie was taking a look at him as a girl.

When the body ultimately shifts to disclose his worker (Jan Gunnar Roise), there’s some dry amusement within the discovery that the supervisor isn’t even a Bowie fan. However the director by no means makes enjoyable of the openness and honesty in these two males’s conversations, that are the guts of the movie.

Even at their morning pool appointments to swim laps with a bigger group, there’s no hint of “bro” bravado or awkwardness. Neither is there even the faintest whiff of homosexual panic when an out-of-the-blue disclosure causes the supervisor to have a look at his buddy and colleague in a unique gentle. Whether or not that is practical or want success is unimportant. All that issues is that it’s credible within the central relationship depicted right here and the nuanced performances of each actors.

The worker follows the dream dialogue by revealing that yesterday whereas on a job, he was chatting within the kitchen of a shopper, who regarded him up and down approvingly and sexually propositioned him. The chimney sweeper laughed it off and left, however after stepping outdoors thought, “Why not?” So he went again in and was on the receiving finish of some pleasant afternoon delight. When his supervisor says he didn’t know he was homosexual, the staffer says “I’m not,” and we imagine him.

He additionally shares that he went dwelling and informed his spouse of 20 years (Siri Forberg), sustaining that he doesn’t regard the interlude as dishonest as a result of there’s no hiding or mendacity concerned. She doesn’t fairly see it that method, and whereas there aren’t any hysterical arguments about infidelity, she will’t let it go the subsequent day when he simply desires to speak about plans for the backyard or take their sons to dinner at Ikea. When she worries he is perhaps homosexual, he says, “Having one beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic.”

One of many key components of the expertise is the husband’s admission that he was turned on by having a person take a look at him that method. Among the many movie’s extra oddly touching impressions is that males need to really feel desired, not in any swaggering horndog method however actually in ways in which don’t match neatly into the boilerplate mildew of husband and father. Nonetheless, he feels dangerous in regards to the ache he prompted his spouse and assures her he has no intention of doing it once more.

In the meantime, the supervisor, who sings with a choir, is puzzled by a shift in his voice, sounding barely greater and a bit of constricted. The group’s orchestra chief recommends a vocal coach (Nasrin Khusrawi), who helps loosen up his tongue, telling him the issue is probably going in his head and stress-related. The Bowie dream turns into a recurring a part of his sleep, however moderately than waking up feeling uneasy, he begins to get pleasure from the feeling of being checked out as a girl.

There are lots of layers each in Haugerud’s screenplay and within the two principal actors’ performances, subtly concerning the methods wherein codes of masculinity have inhibited them, maybe inflicting them to suppress components of their nature, significantly when it comes to their sexuality. Each appear to welcome a brand new sense of vulnerability, possibly even of a beforehand untapped female facet that equates not with weak spot however with private freedom.

The movie is laced with dry humor but additionally poignancy and notes of melancholy. That applies to a shift when the enjoyment afforded the chimney sweeper by his liberating sexual encounter turns to disgrace, guilt and remorse after discussing it together with his startled spouse. When she talks it by with individuals outdoors the wedding, somebody advises her to put in writing down her emotions as a method of sustaining management. The shifting offshoot of that comes later when her husband expresses unhappiness to his supervisor that the story not seems like his.

Extra amusingly, he suggests to his supervisor that confessing to having slept with a person was most likely simpler for him than the latter admitting to being a Christian.

Haugerud’s screenplay deftly expands its ideas on gender roles and expectations by observing the 2 males’s teenage sons, with out ever changing into schematic.

The chimney sweeper’s eldest boy, Hans Petter (Hadrian Jenum Skaaland), will get into bother in school for asking what different college students’ mother and father earn. He additionally questions why two feminine strangers felt free to rope him and his dad into shifting a fridge for them, then barely thanked them as they walked away, with Hans Petter nursing what seems to be a major harm.

The supervisor’s son Klaus (Theo Dahl) is insecure about his across-the-board Bs, fretting that mediocre grades will steer him into the lifetime of an underachiever. He desires to begin a YouTube channel like his influencer girlfriend, who shares movies on the whole lot from make-up to menstrual cramps.

In a single humorous scene, Klaus sits working away — the picture of a teenage boy at a stitching machine suggests a youthful era with fewer gender hangups — alongside his father and mom (Birgitt Larsen) whereas they focus on developments with the chimney sweeper. Solely the slightest sideways look from Klaus at one level signifies that the boy is even remotely .

The one factor that feels borderline extraneous — although nonetheless fairly entertaining — is a narrative associated by a chirpy physician (Anne Marie Ottersen). She tells Klaus and his father a few younger homosexual architect and the way his intoxication with the elegant strains of his associate’s again was compromised when the associate shocked him with a full shoulder-width tattoo tribute to his hero, Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s typical of the film’s offbeat humor that one of many sticking factors is the font wherein the identify is emblazoned.

Music figures all through to form the tone and oil the transitions by the use of Peder Capjon Kjellsby’s languorously jazzy rating, with its floating strains of pensive brass. However the loveliest factor is the musical efficiency by the supervisor together with his choir and orchestra group. He seems barefoot, sporting a billowing pink smock and shorts made by Klaus, and leads the singers in a quick tune of reward earlier than they segue right into a sluggish, sensual dance, all unfastened sways and caresses.

The digicam picks up on the sexual magnetism of a younger trumpeter, on what appears like mutual attraction between the supervisor and a fellow male dancer, and most of all, on the depth — presumably tinged by happiness? — on the face of the chimney sweeper, watching within the viewers together with his household. It’s a second totally in character with a compassionate, nonjudgmental film that by no means spells something out, preferring to allow us to type our personal impressions of those two males evolving in ways in which shock and possibly even delight them.