How To Desire| Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories Reframe Sex And Intimacy

Norwegian novelist and filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud broke out early this year with a Golden Bear win for Dreams (2024). The final chapter in the ambitious, yet charmingly low-key Oslo Stories trilogy, Dreams crystallized his ascent to auteur-stardom. The thematically linked trilogy illuminates relationships with liberatory force. No obligation to convention or heterosexuality is sought. The instalments are very much in conversation, refracted through a prism of shifting perspectives. A character’s beliefs and anxieties in one film often mirrors another. They converge into a striking portrait of the city, mapping how its young and middle-aged residents tackle intimacy and relationship pangs. Though the films are conjoined in spirit, Haugerud nevertheless bores into precise differences in the larger ensemble. No single attitude is dismissed; each holds primacy and credence within the filmmaker’s gentle ethos. These are verbose films—more interested in dialectics than snazzy visual choices. At most, a zoom-in heightens an existential dilemma, already underlined in streams of dialogue.

Throughout the films, sexuality is shorn of labels. It’s not about contemporary sexual fluidity, but a historical one, expressed on the walls of Oslo themselves. The second part of the trilogy, Love (2024), opens with a city tour. The fronts of 19th century buildings are read in a way of urging for diverse sexualities. Yet, in her personal life, the guiding historian, Heidi, is largely conservative and pro-monogamy. Love spins off the free-spirited exploits of her friend, Marianne. In a later scene, Heidi admits being threatened by Marianne’s transgressions, her easy hook-ups. Haugerud stresses the need of disconnecting sexuality and sexual practices from morals. The films buzz with lively tension among characters as they question sedimented sexual practice. Queerness is wrestled with, unfastened from linear paths.

When someone does suggest a particular orientation, characters flinch and resist. In Dreams, the 17-year-old Johanne asks with a dash of innocence how her attraction to a new teacher at school, Johanna, makes her queer. Johanne is lost, crippled by inadequacy for she cannot claim Johanna’s attention. She chronicles her impressions to preserve the swell of feelings. In the absence of reaffirmation, the text, she believes, would hold the time, not let it drift away forgotten and unheard. It’s a form of legibility for her own sake, a way of coming to terms with the bramble of confusion and hurt and bitterness, much of which is purely projected and without the teacher to reflect off. Her mother insists otherwise, that the writing could become an inspiring text of queer awakening that’ll help others.

Ostensibly the most subjectively geared in the trilogy, Dreams also flashes its unmaking. Haugerud teases establishing the most intimate access to Johanne’s intense inner world, yet withholding also strategically blurs our understanding. The film teases boundaries between imagination and reality, fiction and lived-in experience. How much does Johanne really know Johanna? She filters the equation through her fantasy. It consumes her. In an unusual spin on the student-teacher infatuation, Johanne is driven to orchestrate her attraction into something substantive.

In the memoir of the relationship, she could at least wield control. The more people have access to the text, she worries her grasp might weaken till she can no longer be at the helm. How much of the text should even be taken at face value? How reliable is the chronicle? Johanne’s mother and grandmother spar over this. It’s interesting to note how their stances change. Initially, the former is taken aback when the latter professes to regarding the text mostly in literary terms. However, this completely flips later.

The trilogy was shot back-to-back, between two summers of 2022 and 2023. It’s like a troupe banded together for a couple of moments and swapped matters of the heart. The films share the same DP Cecilie Semec, who lends Dreams a frosty, alluring coziness, Sex and Love an airy brightness. Jens Christian Fodstad's editing cleaves through long conversations with delicacy and patience. The leads across them don’t see themselves aligning with any discrete sexual group. Haugerud’s philosophy is wondrously open to humans in flux with mutable preferences and aversions. The sole thing resisted is fixities of all kinds. Liking something shouldn’t imply absolute negation of the other. There can be discoveries flowering into co-existence. The trick is not to be too guarded.

Haugerud isn’t per se interested in sex as an act. None of the films stage it. Rather, he examines sex with a conversational bent. How is desire seen, approximated, gathered into a vocabulary? Does putting it in a discursive armor strip away possibilities? Does desire then become tamer, regulated by social mores? The director encourages frank, open dialogue, not codification. Talking through new desires can expand how one looks at themselves and the other.

In an interview with BOMB, Haugerud said, “If we are lucky, we meet someone in our life who challenges us and sees possibilities in us that we didn’t know we had. You get the feeling that it is possible to expand, and most people are longing for that on one level or another. Many of us are content with everyday life as well. But sometimes, we think: Is it possible that it could be more? That I could live in another way? Or think differently than I do right now?” He added, “These people in the films are experiencing encounters that are liberating them, if only for a short time. It makes life bigger for them. That is what I want to say. We should look out for that and be open for those kinds of meetings.”

These accidental meetings seep throughout the trilogy. A stranger opens the doors to what one may have inadvertently stifled within. Adventures push characters to different ways of being. Love splits open through varying approaches to open relationships. Johanne’s speculation on her queerness feels like a contained echo of every curiosity resonating through Sex (2024). In it, two straight male co-workers exchange dreams and strange, singular new experiences. The shock of alien erotic sensations isn’t leaned into so much as what they call to the surface. The film opens with intimate confessions between two Oslo chimney sweeps. The company supervisor shares a dream where a David Bowie-like figure, with Christ-like imposition, came to him. The queer charge Bowie's persona has wielded is unmistakable. What lingers from the dream is being looked at as a woman. It felt freeing.

The other sweeper initially exults in having had sex with a male client. Though married, he doesn’t see his act through the infidelity lens. He tells his colleague casually, who’s readily startled. Yes, he’s surprised that it happened, but is unwilling to reason much with it. He insists on never being wary or fearful of homosexuality. He has just not been attracted to men. However, something about the client’s lusting gaze unlocks a tide of desire within him. Being wanted indicates a covert need be affirmed.

Of course, it opens a can of worms once he shares the incident with his wife. He won’t fuss over sex with a male stranger, which she refuses to let go of. To him, it’s not cheating since it has no emotional antecedent or map. It’s nothing but a pressing, passing impulse indulged, having no value of a proper relationship. He cannot fathom why his wife should be threatened or insecure. It’s just sex, which he compares to physical treatment at a chiropractor or doctor’s. To her, it’s the most intimate thing they share. She struggles to trust him. She asks for details. Why does he turn reserved when otherwise he’s so candid about sex?

An immediate gulf widens between them. Haugerud doesn’t let the friction blow into full-scale fights. As she suspects he might be gay, he rebuts, “Having one beer doesn’t make me an alcoholic.” As he ponders deeper on the gaze, it’s a benevolent gender-neutrality that drew him. “It was an open gaze,” he tells his wife. For once, he felt seen without gendered, social expectations. His baulking at his wife’s sharing the anecdote with others harks exactly to what Johanne in Dreams fears. Both dread losing ownership over their narratives. These human anxieties are articulated throughout Haugerud’s trilogy. The arguments may seem almost too impeccable, characters too forgiving and sedate even in roiling situations. But the filmmaker keeps contradicting, pulling apart every settled position, infusing even perfectly worded tussle with richly messy life force.