Not sure what it is about the Norwegian capital that inspires work that comes in threes. We already have filmmaker Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, but those movies were released over a period of ten years. The three feature-length films that comprise Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories were all produced in 2024, though they’ve been released in various territories separately and in different orders. In Japan, they’re being released theatrically all at the same time, and I’ve chosen to review them in the order I saw them, though if you want to be anal about it they were released in Norway in the following order: Sex, Love, Dreams. What ties them together is their quiet tone and unfussy visual style, not to mention their heavy reliance on dialogue. Many critics have already noted that fans of other dialogue-crazy directors, like Rohmer and Hong Sangsoo, would likely appreciate Haugerud’s films more readily, but Haugerud’s have stronger plot structures, which is probably a function of the director’s other profession, published novelist. And lumping them together as Oslo Stories isn’t just a convenient marketing conceit. Haugerud’s loving interscene shots of the city skyline and streets work to ground the action in a place with a real personality that is inseparable from those of the characters.

The protagonists of Sex are two chimney sweeps, which apparently is a ubiquitous vocation in Norway. We meet the two unnamed men in media res, finishing lunch in their offices and talking about a dream that the supervisor (Thorbjørn Harr) had the previous night, in which he was mistaken for a woman by David Bowie. The surpervisor reveals that he found the attention stimulating. This admission prompts his subordinate (Jan Gunnar Røise) to confess that the day before he had sex with a man, and not in a dream. The supervisor is shocked because he was not aware his subordinate was homosexual, a remark that further prompts a denial from the subordinate that he is gay. The other man just suggested the tryst and, being flattered, he thought “Why not?” and found the experience pleasant. 

The remainder of the film addresses the repercussions of this act in both men’s relationships with their respective families. As it turns out, the subordinate tells his wife (Siri Forberg) of twenty years about the sexual encounter and she is understandably upset, a reaction the surbordinate seems not to have expected, and much screen time is given over to the couple debating the moral niceties of his decision. He insists that sex isn’t love and that he’s completely committed to his marriage (“Having one beer doesn’t make you an alcoholic”), an opinion that sounds defensive and is treated as such by the wife. In the meantime, the supervisor describes his dream to his wife (Birgitte Larsen), who doesn’t think it’s a big deal but worries that it is a big deal to her husband, who, especially in the wake of his subordinate’s act (with a client, by the way, which should provoke some sort of disciplinary action), has become obsessed with it to the point where the dream keeps recurring. 

Though all three movies are comedies to a certain extent, Sex is obviously designed to be the funniest, an attribute highlighted by the score, which seems to parody the fusion-disco of 70s jazzbos like Chuck Mangione. And while the story is involving up to a point, it’s the least successful of the three because it feels like a one-joke idea stretched beyond its thematic limits.

Dreams is the only film that centers on one protagonist, in this case a high school girl named Johanne (Ella Øverbye) who develops an insurmountable crush on her new French teacher, Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Haugerud initially takes the crush as seriously as Johanne does. She’s a typical adolescent, susceptible to the romantic notions rife in classic novels, interpreting her infatuation as an indication she is capable of true love, but frets that it will remain unrequited. Her studies suffer, and her single mother, Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), and published poet grandmother, Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), become concerned without understanding the reason. Then Johanne gets up the nerve to visit Johanna’s apartment in the ritzy part of town uninvited and what happens between them is banished to a cinematic ellipse. 

In the next scene, the “affair” has been over for some time and Johanne has recorded it all in a kind of memoir that she shows Karin, who finds its candor disturbing but the writing uniformly excellent. Up to now, the story has been a kind of purplish take on teenage obsession, like Endless Love, but now it wanders into more amorphous territory. Karin insists on showing the manuscript to Kristin, who at first wonders if she shouldn’t report Johanna to the school or even the police since Johanne is still a minor. But she, too, is impressed with the writing and both she and Karin wonder if this couldn’t be a major work if published.

Dreams is the best of the three movies if only because its navigation of muddy ethical waters is so carefully thought out. Just as Johanne turns out to be a predictably unreliable narrator, Johanna turns out to be both more and less forthright in her approach to dealing with the troubled emotional trajectories of her female students (Johanne, it turns out, isn’t the first to fall for her charms). Likewise, the mother’s and the grandmother’s dreams of celebrity are both self-serving and overblown in the end. The deflation of expectations—both the characters’ and the viewer’s—is the script’s most delicious aspect, and one that deserves much more discussion than I can give it here.

Love returns to the bipartite structure of Sex in that it’s really two movies that are only lightly connected to each other. The protagonists are hospital employees, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), a urologist, and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), a nurse who often works on her service. Much of Marianne’s job is explaining to men that they have prostate cancer and what that means. After one explanation, Tor chides Marianne on her bedside manner—or lack of it, since the man who now has to undergo the removal of his prostate didn’t seem to completely understand what’s in store. It’s not so much that Marianne is a woman talking about a man’s most intimate fears (later, Tor, a gay man, also comments on how Marianne neglects to take into consideration what her explanations miss when the interlocutor is homosexual), but that her professionalism extends to her emotional sphere. Marianne is not interested in marriage or having children, but likes sex, a combination that her best friend, Heidi (Marte Engebrigsten), a historian who works for the city, means to satisfy by fixing her up with a charming divorced geologist, Ole (Thomas Gullestad).

Tor’s story is less fraught, though, like the subrodinate’s in Sex or Johanna’s in Dreams, more ethically problematic. Tor likes to pick up men on the ferry that takes him between Oslo and the suburb where he lives, and one night he encounters an older man through Grindr who isn’t into sex, which is fine by Tor, who is happy just to talk. Later, Tor spies this man, Bjørn (Lars Jacob Holm), at his hospital, where he has just received a diagnosis of prostate cancer from a different urologist. When Tor attempts to comfort him, Bjørn angrily turns him away, but Tor is insistent in the long run.

In a sense, Love is more about sex than Sex is. At first, Marianne resists Ole’s entreaties to stay the night and, on a whim, picks up a random guy on the ferry herself and has casual sex with him, a sequence that’s probably the funniest of the trilogy. Heidi is, of course, scandalized, which tests their friendship and makes Marianne realize how unmoored her own decision-making apparatus is. Tor’s nominal nurse-patient relationship with Bjørn allows Haugerud to explore the niceties of homoerotic love in ways more nuanced and edifying than in Sex or Dreams, including an emotionally devastating monologue by Bjørn about what he went through as a gay man from the AIDS epidemic through to his loss of sexual capacity due to his surgery. If Haugerud is worthy of accolades for anything it is this amazingly empathetic biographical snippet. 

Sex, Dreams and Love, in Norwegian, open today in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho, Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita.

Sex, Dreams and Love home page in Japanese

photos (c) Motlys