Love was the Norwegian climax of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo trilogy, the most lovestruck vision of his city and boldest prophesy of how to live there, beyond borders and bonds of sexual identity and shame. Released here between Dreams’ meta-memories of swooning first love and Sex’s look at desire undefined by gender, it also settles in Oslo’s heart.
Gay nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) and his straight doctor colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) are complementary leads in a film as concerned with female desire as the queer lens Haugerud’s work is conceived through. The set-piece speech, though, goes to Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsten, pictured below right with Jacobsen and Hovig), Marianne’s best friend from the rustic background shared by most of Love’s characters and Haugerud himself, who view their adopted city with chosen devotion. Standing by City Hall, a red-brick building with the industrial solidity of London’s Tate Modern and post-war utopianism of its South Bank, Heidi conjures a coded language of inclusivity in its stone friezes and statuary, perceiving a Christian blessing of single mums, bisexual threesomes, homosexuality and women. This Oslo of Haugerud’s fervent imagining stands as an urban declaration of rights, a statement of unshackled pleasure.
Tor embodies these possibilities as he takes the ferry back and forth, turning this limbo into a sexual free zone where he notes those cruising Grindr and offers his company. Unattached intimacy is its own reward. Single Marianne takes the same ferry to a party hosted by a potential boyfriend, geologist Ole Harald (Thomas Gullestad), and impulsively puts her hand on his bum, a moment of agency headier than the prospect of sex. She instead discovers and adopts Tor’s ferry MO, picking up a man for breezy congress in Oslo Harbour. While Haugerud’s other Oslo stories depict suburban, geometric modernity, he makes its centre mythic beneath a glowing moon or folk-tale rainbow, glinting in the nocturnal distance as the ferry plies Oslofjord like it’s an erotic, invertedly life-giving Styx. Geologist Ole Harald finds soulful meaning in its very soil, as his and Marianne’s hands touch across his topography model.
Haugerud is a novelist as well as writer-director, and his dreamy characters’ leisurely dialogue provides their own talking cures, as radical life solutions are arrived at with sweet Norwegian reason. Marianne and Tor’s apparent courses switch in midstream, as his casual intimacy leads to the more devoted caring already glimpsed in his empathetic work, and she divines a future between relationship pressures. Moral liberty is the only law.
As two of Haugerud’s inspirations, Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen (especially Manhattan) also prove, conversation and urban backdrops can be highly cinematic. With a rep company of top Norwegian actors recurring through a decade’s work awaiting UK discovery, his nonjudgmental but highly moral ethos and camera minded to sit back and observe everyday beauty complete a distinctive aesthetic. It is built on Oslo itself, transmuted by fantastical faith and hope into a refuge city for human potential, where sex and love set you free.
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