Unlike the two other entries in Dag Johan Haugerud’s thematically linked Love-Sex-Dreams trilogy, Dreams is not concerned with steadily paced dialogues or mature perspectives. While the fact it won the Golden Bear, awarded by a jury headed by Todd Haynes, might suggest some kind of new queer cinema lineage, Haugerud’s film is an intellectualized treatment of first love. Just by virtue of its approach — a memory-steeped montage guided by meta-reflective voiceover — it stands out in the trilogy. Still, Haugerud’s tendencies of over-universalizing his scenarios, and of never finding a way out of a schematic structure for the films besides adding on more interpretive scaffolding via dialogue, are still present.
For most of its runtime, Dreams is propulsive enough. High school student Johanne (Ella Øverbye), dissatisfied with the range of prospects she can imagine ahead of her — school, career, family — has her imagination ignited, if not subsumed, when she begins a new semester with French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu), who has recently come to live in Oslo after time in Paris and the U.S. It proves to be slightly more than a crush contained by a schoolroom’s walls. Is it love? It’s at least a private repository of memories, narrated in retrospect by Johanne and gilded with quasi-fictional resonances. Later, we learn that Johanne has channeled her unrequited emotions into an unvarnished autofiction novella. But the narration hovers even above that narrativized form, the processing of what Johanne turns over and over again in her mind continues beyond the written word.
It is, she presents in voiceover, the duty or the consequence of the daydreamer to attach significance to the mundane. So that we learn of a classical novel that acts as either premonition or fuel for the moment when one of the few things that Johanne actually knows about Johanna — that she knits her own wool sweaters to withstand the Norwegian winter — becomes a form of attachment between them. “I was at Johanna’s place nine times in total,” she says. Each visit means something intensely individuated to her; but it’s perhaps only routine to Johanna. (All we see them do is talk.) The film plays this material directly and chronologically, allowing Johanne’s investment and self-critique to impress us: here is someone who knows both sides now, and whose idea of how she’s changed is in proportion. Nothing “happens” between them, except that she learns about the gaps between people, and how difficult these voids of information are to cross: Johanne, by virtue of her hierarchical position and her experience, can fill the endlessly reconfigurated possibilities of Johanne’s self-propelling narrative, week after week. But in her moments of clarity, the student perceives how it’s impossible for this to be an equal exchange back to Johanna.
DIRECTOR: Dag Johan Haugerud; CAST: Ella Øverbye, Selome Emnetu, Ane Dahl Torp; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: September 12; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
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