Oslo Trilogy: Sex

 

Director Dag Johan Haugerud

OSLO TRILOGY: SEX                     B                                                                                 Norway  (118 mi)  2024  ‘Scope  d: Dag Johan Haugerud

If you, as a human being, have the capacity to recognize goodness and beauty, and be excited by it.  If you have the capacity to recognize injustice and act on it.  If you have the capacity to recognize evil and distance yourself from it.                                                                                     —Chimney Sweep CEO (Thorbjørn Harr) recalling the words of David Bowie in a dream sequence

Author and filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud studied to become a librarian at Oslo University College, while obtaining a degree in film studies at Stockholm University, theater studies at the University of Oslo, and writer’s studies at Telemark University College, making an ambitious Oslo Trilogy with three stand-alone films connected by complementary themes and perspectives, including the location of Oslo and the heartfelt and mature storytelling technique that ruminates on modern day relationships, revolving around themes of desire, identity, and a longing for freedom.  There is an existing Oslo Trilogy in Joachim Trier’s Reprise (2006),  2011 Top Ten Films of the Year #10 Oslo, August 31, and 2021 #3 Film of the Year The Worst Person in the World (Verdens verste menneske), a melancholy, intricately observed portrait of a city in flux, documenting the changing face of a modernizing Oslo, with people questioning their role in life and what place self-expression might play in it.  Allegedly inspired by Krzysztof Kieslowski’s THREE COLORS TRILOGY, with its intersecting plot scenarios, offering different settings and characters, yet sharing certain themes, where  “liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity” have been replaced by “Sex,” “Love,” and “Dreams,” which is the order they were released in Norway, with the title suggesting one thing, but no sex is ever shown, instead it is discussed extensively by two different heterosexual men in their marriages, one an atheist and the other a Christian, examining contemporary masculinity through waves of repercussions that play out in fragile and unexpected ways, as each of the three segments prominently features unnamed heterosexual characters being confronted by a sudden sense of queer desire, challenging our view of masculinity, and hopefully broadening our perspectives.  For instance, sexuality is more amorphous than how it tends to be represented, where a gay act is not necessarily equated with being gay, so they have to get through an undercurrent of exploratory emotional travails with very few moments of solitary reflection.  Outside of the city of Oslo itself, which has come to be viewed as a special place, a city of hope, like a welcoming sanctuary city known for its broad-minded openness, as Nordic countries in general are very secular, where they don't feel the suffocating pressure of religious morality, there are no recurring characters in the Oslo Trilogy with the exception of Bjørn (Lars Jacob Holm), a gay psychiatrist/psychologist who appears in all three films, a central character in LOVE, but otherwise only appears in brief cameo appearances.  A morality tale more reminiscent of Éric Rohmer’s SIX MORAL TALES (1963 – 1972), with Haugerud writing his thesis on the French filmmaker at university, this has a literary feel, intelligent and complex, exuding in the possibilities of new relationship models, where homoerotic longing is evident, yet language repeatedly gains the upper hand over cinematic aesthetics, expressed through nuanced character studies crisscrossed with long dialogue sequences, making this is a conversation-heavy film exploring the uncharted territories of male sexuality.  Shooting over the course of a year rather than just a few weeks, with echoes of Hong Sang-soo’s dialogue-heavy dramas, this may also recall Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), where the first two are among the best romantic love stories of the modern era, yet this lacks Linklater’s romantic spontaneity in the moment, instead exploring the boundaries we establish in our lives around sex and gender, and whether they are expansive enough to encompass all of who we are and have the potential to be.

Opening with a panoramic view of the city, shot in ‘Scope by Cecilie Semec, giving the interior scenes an almost sterile look, with a jazz fusion, conventionally mainstream, flugelhorn-led score by Peder Capjon Kjellsby that sounds like Chuck Mangione from the 70’s, we see two chimney sweeps on rooftops cleaning out chimney stacks before retreating to an office with expansive city views of Oslo’s rooftops outside as CEO (Thorbjørn Harr) describes a recently recurring dream with David Bowie looking at him as if he were a woman, suddenly the object of a male gaze, which apparently hits a raw nerve, as this is something he’s never felt before, and he’s not sure what to make of it.  “It’s strange how dreams change when you start talking about them.”  His work partner (Jan Gunnar Røise) responds with a recent real-life incident with one of his male customers who asked to have sex with him.  Initially rebuffed, as he’s not gay, he left the premises, but stopped himself on the street and reconsidered, equally enamored by the way this man lustfully “looked” at him, like he’s being objectified, claiming “no one had ever looked at me like this,” so he stepped back inside and surrendered to a completely different sexual experience, one that opened his eyes and left him thrilled in a uniquely different way.  Both men are close and openly transparent with each other, speaking in an unusually relaxed manner, with private thoughts revealed in confidence, finding themselves shaken in ways they don’t truly understand, stirring confusion, while leading us to question how much our personalities are shaped by how others see us.  Structured very much like a play, this sets the stage for what follows, with the film getting into layered detail about the ramifications, delving into an interior landscape accentuating the power of emotions that resembles what we’ve seen before from Ingmar Bergman, particularly Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) (1973), with both men seeking transparency and understanding with their wives.  The filmmaker, who is gay, acknowledges that everything he does is through a queer perspective, claiming one of his goals in the trilogy had been to describe what might happen if people of all sexualities adopted a gay perspective on intimacy, a radically subversive concept, one must say, offering a counterpoint to the rise of a social discourse centered on conflict and division.  While the partner was ecstatic about his secret interlude, when he shared what happened with his wife (Siri Forberg), she is less than enthused, bringing her close to tears, viewing it as a marital betrayal, wondering just how he might feel if she had engaged in a similar sexual encounter.  “Marriage is not there to curb our sexuality,” he responds, making a case for seemingly aberrant desires and impulses as an everyday fact of life, something that initially left him sexually elated, literally beaming with enthusiasm, yet he does not perceive it either as an expression of homosexual desire or an act of infidelity, quickly becoming a source of shame, however, as he wrongly thought he could compartmentalize the impact and matter only to him, but his wife immediately calls him on it, viewing it as cheating, a breach of trust, not some small matter, exposing how questions about sex and sexuality carry so much anxiety and moral weight.  We’ve seen this before in the queer cinema of Ira Sach’s 2023 Top Ten List #8 Passages, where Tomasz (Franz Rogowski) comes home to his gay husband (Ben Whishaw) one day and declares he just had sex with a woman for the first time and enjoyed it, expecting his husband to share in the joy, but his partner is more than a little perturbed. 

Regularly occurring pictures of Oslo appear as construction sites and giant building cranes can be seen, revealing an orderly city with minimalist architecture that is never finished, mirroring our relationships which are never complete, continually evolving over time.  Chimney sweepers are a predominately male-dominated profession, offering the filmmaker an opportunity to shoot rooftop vistas that encompass city and sky landscapes, where the largesse of the expansive view is countered by small, intimate moments in enclosed spaces between marital partners, who tend to squabble about their everyday lives, caught up in conventional lives, yet espousing unusually liberal-minded thoughts about an expanding role of freedom in their relationship, which seems to be more of a pipe dream than an existing reality, as they are mostly guided by conventional societal practices.  These marital conversations are the heart of the film, as the seemingly defensive work partner insists that sex isn’t love, and that he’s completely committed to his marriage, contending “Having one beer doesn’t make you an alcoholic.”  This key scene goes on for some length, where she is initially seen only from the back, a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s My Life to Live (Vivre Sa Vie: Film en douze tableaux) (1962) when actress Anna Karina is similarly seen only from the back in her first scene.  The CEO and his wife (Birgitte Larsen) are guided by principles of the Christian church they attend, where he sings in the choir, but seems to be experiencing muscle spasms in the back of his tongue, so his music instructor Nasrin Khusrawi offers him ways to help relax the muscle.  While we don’t learn any of their names, creating an anonymous yet universal aspect to what we are seeing, this never becomes a wish fulfillment of gay fantasies, and though there’s nothing earthshaking about any of this, with no startling revelations, it’s discussed in a relaxed and candid atmosphere, with differing viewpoints diverging from what was expected.  The men are dumbfounded by their wives’ reactions, causing them to rethink what they’re feeling, offering surprisingly frank discussions, which go even deeper when total strangers enter the picture, like a visit to a shockingly outspoken doctor (Anne Marie Ottersen), where she apparently has an infinite amount of time, revealing extremely personal anecdotes that become a black and white flashback sequence of a story-within-a-story, where the initial idea keeps expanding into new realms, yet viewed within the confines of a typical middle class family defined by comfort and stability.  Challenging us to reconsider our understanding of sexuality, gender, and identity, this is perhaps a European expression about the way things could and should be, but isn’t, as society is instead overwhelmed by a condemnational aspect to anything straying from the norm, where in the age of the internet expansion, social media crushes mental health outlooks with regularity, creating heightened anxiety, depression, loneliness, increased levels of psychological distress, and lower life satisfaction.  The film pretends to give an open view of modern relationships, but feels extremely conservative with little innovation due to the reluctance of many characters, yet it offers no moral judgments, no easy resolutions, remaining open to interpretation.  Subtle and unconventional, this feels more like a free form essay on expanding the role of what constitutes gender, suggesting it may be pigeonholed into a corner where it is literally unable to breathe.  Because the characters continue to ask curious questions without judging, more and more is told about the characters themselves, displaying unusual degrees of tolerance and emotional intelligence.

Blind Husbands

 

Writer/director Erich von Stroheim

BLIND HUSBANDS            B                                                                                               USA  (92 mi)  1919  d: Erich von Stroheim                      Austrian version 99 mi

In the Alps there is no sin.                                                                                                               —embroidered sign hanging on the wall of one of the hotel rooms

When von Stroheim arrived in America from Austria at the age of 24 in 1909, he claimed to be the son of a German Baroness and an Austrian Count, and a decorated graduate from the Austrian Military Academy at Wiener Neustadt.  In reality, he was the son of Johanna and Benno Stroheim, a middle class Jewish hat maker and manufacturer.  So right from the start, he existed in a fictitiously created alternate reality, so he seemed destined to work in the world of cinema, claiming in his early biographies that his family had a long history in the Austrian cavalry, entering the Hollywood film industry in 1914 as an extra and horse handler, working in blackface for D.W. Griffith’s BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) as a recently freed slave, eventually working as an uncredited assistant director on the film, and a production assistant on INTOLERANCE (1916).  It was there that he became impressed by Griffith’s attention to detail, his insistence on character development, and his sense of realism, the same things that would eventually make von Stroheim legendary in his own quest for a place in filmmaking history, far ahead of his time in terms of his modernity, and his refusal to compromise his artistic vision.  In his early roles, he developed a reputation for playing the well-mannered, sophisticated European that American audiences loved to hate, but with the outbreak of WWI, with America fighting against Germany, Hollywood was anxious about anyone that might resemble the enemy on the battlefield, so his named was dropped from the credits and he was blacklisted by the industry.  However, after the war, the studios turned to pro-American and anti-German propaganda films, where they needed actors who could convincingly portray Prussian military officers, and von Stroheim fit the bill, becoming an expert in German military uniforms and paraphernalia.  Comfortably back in the business, he took the opportunity to write his own screenplay for his script-in-progress entitled The Pinnacle, going so far as to camp out on the grounds of the home of Universal studio head Carl Laemmle, a fellow German-Jewish émigré who was known for producing low-budget movies, as opposed to the big budget, star-driven Paramount pictures.  The ploy apparently worked as he was given the opportunity to direct his own script about adultery lurking in a mountain setting, but Laemmle changed the title to BLIND HUSBANDS.  As a child, his family often vacationed in the Tyrolean Alps, drawing on personal experience when he envisioned the story.  Essentially a mountain film, featuring daring climbing scenes, it presents protagonists who flee the hustle and bustle of their daily lives seeking solitude or a higher purpose in the mountains, which represent a sacred place.  Using a color scheme where sepia was used for the evening scenes, blue for the night scenes, and black and white for the day scenes, what stands out in his debut feature at the age of 33 is the director’s willingness to explore human frailty, romantic intrigue, and the darker aspects of human nature, contrasting the majesty of the natural world and the perversity of toxic desire.  Of interest, in 1982 a version was discovered by the Austrian Film Archives that was seven minutes longer than existing Hollywood prints.

Biographer Richard Koszarski called BLIND HUSBANDS “the most impressive and significant debut film in Hollywood history” before the coming of Orson Welles’ CITIZEN KANE (1941), with both von Stroheim and Orson Welles, dominant personalities, sharing remarkably similar career paths, as each made a name for themselves as a performer before making their first films, receiving success and adulation before the studios would turn against them, basically exiling them from Hollywood.  While this is simpler and less elaborate than his later films, von Stroheim developed a reputation for perfectionism and overspending, abandoning all shooting schedules, leading to legendary conflicts with producers, which is the primary reason why all his films after this one were drastically cut by his producers, yet his films caused both outrage and admiration.  He blended the working methods of Griffith with the literary influences of European modernism, becoming the prime creator in Hollywood of witty, risqué, European-like sex-triangle comedy-dramas, where his initial successes in the early 1920’s were characterized by subtle acting touches and complex sophistication in visual storytelling that impressed American audiences as essentially European and fascinatingly decadent.  While it’s one of the earliest films to realistically portray female desire, the unmistakable eroticism is quite contained, featuring the fetishistic framing of a woman’s legs and ankles.  The maker of Greed (1924) and The Great Gabbo (1929), yet perhaps best known for his onscreen portrayal of Captain Von Rauffenstein in Jean Renoir’s THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937), he was a cynical romantic, concerned with destroying an idealized romanticism that promoted righteousness and redemption, where the upper classes were no more models of perfection than the lower classes beacons of hardworking respectability.  His worldview was decidedly darker, filled with exploiters and exploited of all classes, with a devotion to grim realism.  Beneath the veneer of pre-World War I, imperial Europe was a void of immorality as ugly as the surface was pretty.  In von Stroheim’s eye, no one was exempt from the depravity, as it was all-consuming.  Even in a somewhat imperfect film, where none of the characters (outside of the director) are particularly interesting, the director’s remarkable flair for visual drama is already evident, though the story lags in parts, seemingly conventional by today’s standards, lacking the tragic scale of his later films, though the point of view is extremely unconventional, as von Stroheim uses dreams and omens to reveal the most intimate feelings of the characters.  Avoiding wordy intertitles, the title card near the beginning informs us that a husband who neglects his wife is more deserving of our contempt than “the other man” who steps in, though society is quick to condemn the intruder, failing to examine the husband’s culpability.  The film explores an overarching, symbolic message, but rather than celebrate traditional human values like loyalty and sacrifice, the emphasis lies in ambiguity and ambivalence, casting himself as an aberrant male seducer, embodying von Stroheim’s perverse masculinity, the prototype of a character who would appear again in subsequent von Stroheim films such as FOOLISH WIVES (1922) and THE WEDDING MARCH (1928).  After the German defeat in the war, the outcome affected the director, making films that tackled issues of male virility, where a mountain climber is viewed as the pinnacle of rugged strength.

The story of an inattentive husband, Dr. Robert Armstrong (Sam De Grasse, from D.W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE), an overly intrusive Austrian cavalry officer, Lieutenant Eric Von Steuben (Erich von Stroheim), and the neglected wife, Margaret Armstrong (Francelia Billington) who finds herself in between.  Curiously dedicated to Sepp Innerkofler, world-famous mountain guide (Gibson Gowland, who would later play McTeague in Greed), we find ourselves in a small yet forbidding Alpine village on the Austro-Italian frontier free of cars or any signs of modernity, known today as the Italian Dolomites (the director avoids national affiliation).  Meticulously reconstructing a European setting within a U.S. film studio, an American couple spend their holiday in the Alps in what is ostensibly a love triangle, as the film goes to great lengths to show an aloof Dr. Armstrong reading a newspaper, talking to other people, not responding to her questions, or just generally disregarding his wife, who appears bored, which the constantly smoking Lieutenant, well-groomed and perfectly dressed in full military attire, notices.  By ascertaining that there’s a certain emotional distance between them, the Lieutenant thinks that he can exploit the situation to his own ends, so he fills the void by offering compliments and gifts, as well as attentiveness and affection, which she initially appreciates, expressing a desire for any kind of attention, producing a mixture of thrill and terror.  Seriously contemplating an extramarital affair until he forces himself in her room and basically manhandles her, so much of this film takes place in her imagination, producing a nightmare in which von Steuben’s face, with a demonic smirk, hovers as if suspended in air, like a disembodied object of German Expressionist horror, so she is quick to keep him at arm’s length afterwards, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to seduce her.  The embodiment of a sexual predator, he takes great pleasure in romancing the waitress (Fay Holderness), who has an erotic fascination with his uniform, and a local woman he meets (A Village Blossom, Ruby Kendrick), though the real object of his desire is Margaret, using the exact same poetic lines with each one of them, “This wonderful night is ours - - yours and mine - - and even the good old moon seems to give us her blessing,” suggesting he’s a bit of a Don Juan character, with an appreciation for “wine, women, and song.”  All this takes place under the observant eyes of Sepp, the morally upright mountain guide (and his everpresent St. Bernard dog), who is a friend of Dr. Armstrong, repeatedly getting in the way of von Steuben’s intentions, with Margaret renouncing the Lieutenant’s erotic advances, though her husband aptly remains clueless.  A missing scene found in the Austrian print has von Steuben and Margaret visiting a local chapel, leading her to the top of the bell tower where he then kisses her.  A dramatic showdown ensues between the rival men on a dangerous mountain ascent, intercut with scenes of a distraught Margaret waiting in a state of guilt-ridden panic in an enclosed interior space, while outdoors there’s a struggle for dominance, which exposes each of them for their own shortcomings, ending in disaster.  The characters are never identified by name, listing them instead as the Husband, the Wife, and the Other Man, essentially stripping them of any individualization.  While it plays out like a morality play, they are reduced to base instincts, morally corrupt, and driven by desire.  Dr. Armstrong represents the Puritanical American dedicated to his work, which causes him to overlook his wife, while the Lieutenant is a caricature of a superficially polite and educated European aristocrat and officer, ultimately exposed as a braggart and womanizer.  While there are elements of a traditional melodrama, von Stroheim avoids exaggeration, preferring to use wit and irony and easily recognizable characters, while encouraging naturalistic acting instead of the broad gestures of silent film, though his obsession with realism caused him to reshoot scenes over and over again in a mad attempt to get it right, searching for a perfect ideal, frustrating both the cast and the crew, which then required laborious sifting through the extensive footage shot to mold a completed film. While it’s nowhere near his best, this is the only film von Stroheim made as he intended, without producer interference, making it unique in that regard, as he was never again able to maintain artistic control of his films, so it holds a special significance.       

Note

The mountain inn features a happy honeymooning couple, offering a sharp contrast to the more complacent protagonists.  Of interest, the woman, Valerie Germonprez, married the director a year after the film was released.  

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