Somewhat confusingly, the first release from Dag Johan Haugerud’s epic Norwegian trilogy is Dreams (Sex Love), this year’s Golden Bear winner at Berlin, and the second film in the sequence. (Oslo Stories: Love and Oslo Stories: Sex will arrive in cinemas later this month.)
A coming-of-age drama with novelistic underpinnings, this delightful bildungsroman follows 17-year-old Johanne (a luminous Ella Overbye, channelling Renate Reinsve), who falls in love with her similarly named arts-and-crafts teacher, Johanna (Selome Emnetu). She turns that infatuation into an erotically charged manuscript that unsettles her mother and grandmother in equal but unpredictable ways.
As with the approaching Sex and Love instalments, desire is the quivering undertow here. But Dreams is more interior than its bedfellows, shifting between memory, fantasy, self-mythology and old-fashioned unreliable narration with arch ambiguity.
Johanne’s manuscript is either an earnest confession or an expertly veiled fiction; Haugerud never clarifies the author’s complicity in its contested scenes or how much of the work is rooted in cynical and towering ambition.
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The film’s real concern is not what happened but what it meant to Johanne, what it means to write it down, and how that act shapes (and misshapes) her story.
Much of Dreams unfolds in talk: sprawling, sharp conversations between generations of women about sex and artistic inheritance. Ane Dahl Torp and Anne Marit Jacobsen are excellent as mother and grandmother, whose initial shock at Johanne’s memoir gives way to envy, pride and uneasy longing.
Haugerud’s delicate direction, paired with Cecilie Semec’s gauzy cinematography, builds a world that’s dreamlike but grounded. Knitwear is an unexpectedly titillating star.
At its best, Dreams is intimate and contemplative, anchored by Overbye’s dreamy voiceover and performance. The second half loses some of that purpose. An odd coda featuring an encounter between Johanne and a therapist meanders and goes nowhere. Still, creatives will certainly appreciate the fuzzy intersection of memory, identity and making stuff up that jollies Haugerud’s lingering drama along.
