Renewed “Dreams” at the Berlin Film Festival
Film-festival juries are consistently inconsistent, and often arbitrarily assembled. Each year, several largely unacquainted, disparate-minded luminaries from across the film world—directors, screenwriters, actors, and, on occasion, critics—are brought together to manufacture the illusion of consensus. Even so, certain organizing principles can help nudge that consensus along. At an event such as the Berlin International Film Festival, better known as the Berlinale, the main competition typically includes well-established auteurs and up-and-coming talents alike—an arrangement that, at the risk of generalizing, I’d say often favors the newcomers. Familiarity with a veteran filmmaker doesn’t breed contempt, but it can put a damper on excitement or prompt unflattering comparisons with earlier efforts. A lesser-known artist arrives with no such baggage, and the thrill of making a bold discovery can be accordingly hard to resist.
The Norwegian writer and director Dag Johan Haugerud, who was awarded the Golden Bear, the top prize, at this year’s Berlinale, certainly counts as a discovery—though, at sixty, and with several shorts and features to his name, he is hardly a newcomer. He won over this year’s International Jury, led by the director Todd Haynes, with “Dreams (Sex Love),” a lyrical, moving, gently provocative comedy about the pleasures and the perils of a teen-age infatuation. The movie, whose original Norwegian title is “Drømmer,” is the third entry in a loosely interconnected trilogy; the first two installments, “Sex” and “Love,” screened at the 2024 Berlin and Venice film festivals, respectively. I haven’t seen either of those two films, and I don’t know if any of the jurors did, but I suspect it wouldn’t matter. Though “Dreams (Sex Love)” left me impatient to catch up with the rest of the trilogy, it sweeps you up, assuredly and indeed dreamily, all on its own.
Much of the story is narrated by Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a quietly perceptive seventeen-year-old who develops an intoxicating crush on her French teacher, the similarly named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). In voice-over, she lingers on and amplifies all manner of striking details: Johanna’s worldly bearing and otherworldly beauty; the unbearable stirrings of jealousy aroused when her teacher bonds with other students; the deeper bond that forms when Johanne impulsively pays a visit to Johanna’s apartment. Such interior monologue is often dismissed as an inherently uncinematic device—an assumption to which “Dreams (Sex Love)” provides an absorbing corrective. Haugerud, who’s also a novelist, has an exquisite ear for dialogue, and Johanne’s words, crucially, never seem to be doing, or duplicating, the work of the images. The film’s precise juxtapositions of sight and sound produce brilliant flashes of insight, cascading specifics of texture and emotional coloration, and a cumulatively seductive, almost musical flow.
The narration is also key to a playful yet rigorous literary conceit. Before long, we learn that we have been listening, in part, to excerpts from a manuscript that Johanne has written about her relationship with Johanna—a project that she appears to have undertaken in the spirit of an exorcism. Did Johanne’s love remain unrequited; if not, how far did it go, and what legal or ethical boundaries, if any, were crossed? Exactly how much of the manuscript should be believed in the first place? We are not the only ones pondering these questions; in the film’s most inspired stroke, Johanne shows the manuscript to her grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and her mother (Ane Dahl Torp), in that order. Their reactions show a remarkable complexity of range: shock and concern, of course, but also fascination, confusion, and justified admiration of Johanne’s writerly gifts.
When the possibility emerges that the manuscript might be published, the characters’ responses, including an amusingly abrupt about-face on the mother’s part, develop into a wry and surprising commentary on the age-old practice—sometimes sincere, sometimes mercenary, and sometimes both—of mining one’s experience for art. It’s typical of the characters’ forward-looking wisdom, and Haugerud’s as well, that, although they consider the differentials of age and power at play, Johanne’s attraction to another woman, in and of itself, is not treated as something especially remarkable or as a fixed point of identity. At heart, “Dreams (Sex Love)” understands that desire, in whatever form it manifests, seldom conforms to clean, expected boundaries. In placing three generations of women in such warm and revelatory conversation, it collapses more than a few boundaries of its own.
