The second part of a trilogy but the first of its trio to actually release in the UK, and also the second film titled Dreams to premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival (where it won the Golden Bear), Dag Johan Haugerud’s dreamy, wordy drama has not made itself easy to even google, let alone find an actual screening of. If you make the effort though, there’s some real reward to be had here in a tale of taboos, lies, and the impossibility of being objective about your own life, all told with a restrained quiet and ambiguity.
Surrounded by the similarly mononymic Sex and Love, Dreams is the middle chapter of Haugerud’s ‘Oslo Trilogy’, a trifecta of stories about modern love in Norway, separating itself from its stablemates most immediately in the youth of its protagonist. Where Sex and Love are entirely adult tales, Dreams comes from the point of view of a 17-year-old girl, Johanne (Ella Overbye), who has recently written a memoir/confessional about how she fell in love with her French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) and possibly had an affair with her. It’s an explosive pitch, but tackled in a much more minor key than you might expect; whether or not the affair actually happened at all is left entirely up to your own perceptions.
Haugerud commits entirely to Dreams being from Johanne’s perspective, and the result is, of course, a completely unreliable narrator. Johanne is a very honestly-written teenager, perceptive and clever in many ways (it’s universally agreed that the memoir she writes is a fantastic piece of literature), but also arrogant and delusional and unable to disentangle her deeply felt emotions from actual reality. It’s a very novelistic approach – made even more so by the almost constant authorial narration – and while Dreams can definitely be at times *too* wordy, some conversation scenes blurring into a dense muddle, it mostly allows for piercingly insightful character work.
We get to know Johanne both from what she tells us directly and what we can realise she’s leaving out, a testament to Haugerud’s layered writing. The same goes for her single mum Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp) and her poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), who start out protectively horrified when they first read Johanne’s memoir before they each realise her talent and financial potential as a writer. These long discussions are very well played by this small ensemble, especially when they become argumentative in a way that will feel frighteningly familiar to anyone who grew up with clever parents.
Looping and subtle perhaps to a fault, Dreams earns its title by never really having a fixed destination. This is a chapter in the life of four women from four generations, each with their own strengths and failings (teacher Johanna especially being made up of more of the latter than the former), that finds no salaciousness in what could be quite a tabloid-y story. Haugerud’s background as a novelist is obvious in every moment of the film, though he does still get some lovely shots out of Oslo’s modern architecture and wintry mists, all soundtracked by a sparsely used but beautifully jazzy score, and the result is something more intellectually edifying than thrilling, but with some real punch just the same.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 