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.
Similar names or not, similar minds or not, there is a limit to how far she can bend reality to her will. Early on, she semi-delusionally explains that despite their differences, she “was able to keep up, and Johanna liked that.” But the near classical code of tea and sympathy active in their meetings means that Johanne’s narration displaces the melodramatic maelstrom she has apparently experienced with something studied and ironic. This is, Haugerud might suggest, the path of art, and the way it modifies experience.
This is where Dreams acquires a more blatantly meta-fictional guise, and with it a too-symbolic neatness that suggests not just an addition, but an aversion to the classical mode of its main premise. Johanne’s novella, never intended for publication, is discovered by her grandmother, a poet, and then her mother, a helicopter parent. Together they begin to present a range of possible reactions to the film’s core narrative: openly ambiguous interpretation, sales potential, surveillance forensics, surface-level appreciation, and parental-motivated ethical concern all get their turn. Haugerud is convinced throughout his trilogy that the best way to look at a film is via the sometimes defensively anticipated commentary of his own characters.
By working with such typical, generic material, it would be nearly impossible for the film to err: it all could have happened, this story happens every day. The conceit of zooming out and adding characters is then almost nullifying. It echoes the concerns and annoyances of what happens when a private, meaningful narrative is turned into a publicly received work, but Haugerud’s elaborations do not complicate but distract from the film’s concentrated section of romance.
Johanne could talk about Johanna endlessly. The film’s structure suggests a number of ways she might be forced to decide where she will mark an end. The exercise is completed, but Haugerud remains not entirely convincing as a director of ideas or of drama; instead he represents a middle way, where contemporary relationships simply plod through the feedback circuit of action and reflection. The drama is stingily allocated, and the contemplative atmosphere is gently teased out. The would-be ambition of the trilogy conceit and its emblematic titles has clearly worked on the festival circuit. It might stand as a time capsule of that world, but not the one it wishes to pierce through and properly evoke.
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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