When a modern-day chimneysweep has sex with a man whose chimney he’s, ahem, cleaning, then tells his wife and his colleague, each is forced to question the quirks of sexuality.
One of the hits of Berlinale 2024,
Sex climbs atop the high-rises of a Norwegian city to survey the quizzical contemporary landscape of sex, in which monogamy and fluidity make for uneasy bedfellows. Two married and ostensibly heterosexual friends are unmoored when one of them sleeps with a man and the other begins to question the recurring dreams he’s been having, in which David Bowie gazes at him longingly. Dag Johan Haugerud’s film is funny but also sincere and compassionate, playing out in a series of long, winding, highly articulate conversations. They’re captured by a camera that is fittingly unrestricted, floating between characters mid-scene.