Cinema-“Oslo-Stories: Longing”: It’s not about morality

The starting point of the film “Oslo-Stories: Longing”, in the original simple and much accurate “sex”, is a thought experiment. What happens if a family man is going, follows for a moment of his lust, regardless of his relationships, regardless of conventions and consequences? If he has spontaneous casual sex with a customer, a man?

This is exactly what the nameless chimney sweep (Jan Gunnar Røise) did in Dag Johan Hauberud’s film and now discusses this with his also nameless manager and colleague (Thorbjørn Harr), while the two take a break from the chimney sweep over the rooftops. The colleague also has something to tell about a recurring dream in which David Bowie looks at him, “as if I were a woman”.

Both men are craftsmen, chimney sweep, they are what you would call the “little man”. So we are not dealing with intellectuals or artists here. Both are fathers in happy but unspectacular marriages. There is greatest “normality” here (whatever that may be). But from this normality it is wheelized about your own sexual identity and your own masculinity. This develops a very, very enormous and latent comedy, which lies over and under the hustle and bustle of the protagonists over almost the entire duration of the film.

Part of her, says his wife, is jealous of him.

The strange does not primarily have an entertaining function here. Haubereud wants to make us not laugh (over something) by feeling the situations shown as funny, absurd, bizarre, bizarre, but to think about why we actually find it funny. Because what exactly is absurd or bizarre that two men talk about sex, about the feeling of feeling like a woman in a dream and what that means for her? What is bizarre or absurd about if such topics are discussed with the wife as a matter of course in front of your own teenage son, while that sews a costume for the father’s dance appearance?

Haugerud’s world looks like a fantasy world with its own rules, you feel vaguely reminded of Quentin Dupieux, but in which the absurd often only maintains as a alienation effect. “Oslo stories: longing” works differently. What we find absurd is only because we grew up with social conventions and ideologies and have internalized them that make the most normal in the world appear absurd and strange. Which in turn is quite absurd itself.

The film does not stop, but Haubereud does not want to pedagogate at all. What we should rather think about here is the question of what extent and in the end consequence why our patriarchal and capitalistically determined self -image, which we actually want to be false, immoral or different.

Where does the wife (Siri Forberg) violate come from, who was immediately informed about the affair by her husband? “It’s not about morality,” she explains to him, assured that he has not become homosexual and that he still love her.

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Forberg embodies the “cheated” as a gentle, loving woman and mother, who tries to deal with the pain of her husband’s action in her, without having to escalate the situation too much.

“The worst thing is,” she explains to him, “that part of me is even a little jealous of you. I thought I could admit that I would also like to have something like that. But now you have done it and it hurts so damn to be the other. And that’s terrible, because I actually want us to both have this freedom. But if this freedom hurts so, can I endure that? “

With a few exceptions, the film consists of talks from the protagonists, the four adult main characters are nameless, the backdrop are the roofs of Oslo and the living and bedrooms of the two families, in which the newly discovered sexual experiences of the two men are talked.

The film can be understood as a progressive utopia. With every scene and sequence, Haubereud suggests that this utopia is actually an obvious way of dealing with each other. In any case, however, the film is a plea for it, about everything that hurt us, moves, turns on and what we want to talk to those we trust, even if it could violate the freedom we want to take.

»Oslo Stories: Sehnsucht”, Norwegen 2024. MIT: Jan Gunnar Røise, Thorbjørn Harr, Siri Forberg und Birgitte Larsen. 125 min. Start: 22.5.