When it’s raining love in Hindi cinema, feels quite opportune to have watched a Norwegian film that dwells on its ardency at its most primal and distilled. Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams (Norwegian title Drømmer), the second in his relationship trilogy—Sex Dreams Love—won the Golden Bear, the top award in the Main Competition section at the Berlinale earlier this year. It recently also played at the Sydney Film Festival and the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
The film is all about women, four of them, in fact. On the surface it appears to be a simple exploration of young Johanne’s (Ella Øverbye) growing infatuation for her attractive new French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu). What initially seems like any student’s natural fondness for a compassionate, understanding and fun teacher, starts turning into a compulsive and compelling preoccupation. Unable to grapple with the complexity of emotions that she is experiencing, Johanne goes and knocks on the teacher’s door one day and is welcomed with a warm hug. “It felt like throwing myself from a cliff. I’d either be saved and everything would be fine or my world would come to an end,” she recollects.
What follows remains unexplained and mystifying. What truly happened between the two is left unsaid as Johanne begins putting things down on paper. Later, she shares the writing with her litterateur grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) who, in turn, brings it up with her daughter and Johanne’s mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp). The two are unable to fathom whether the intimate details of the relationship and raw emotions expressed are for real or just imagined and dreamt by Johanne and whether there’s a real case of abuse of the pupil by the teacher. Entirely taken in with the merit of the work, the two also wonder if the evocative, daring memoir could, rather should, get published as a book or not.
Most interestingly the talented and impulsive Johanne also holds a mirror up to them. They are forced to confront their own unrealised dreams, unfulfilled talent and thwarted desires, their choices and regrets in life.
Haugerud’s set of three films, inspired from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s classic Three Colours trilogy, offer varied perspectives on the ideas of companionship, togetherness and intimacy, in the process also casting a glance and questioning gender roles and expectations and the boxes of sexuality which we tend to fit people in. A story of queer awakening is how Johanne’s publisher sees her expression of forbidden passion. “Am I queer just because I fell in love with Johanna?” she asks, lending a fluid dimension to the very idea of it.
Dreams doesn’t quite get explicit, as one would have expected it to. Instead intimacy and eroticism is fleshed out largely through the many conversations. A protracted voiceover (that can otherwise be a tiresome device, a literal nightmare when it comes to the narrative) runs smoothly through the film like a thread explaining the situations, with the characters perennially engaged in chatter. However, despite being dangerously wordy the film never gets annoying. There’s a lightness of touch and lovely play of words which has you invested in the dissection of feelings on screen. The honesty, transparency and longing of first love is achingly lovely, so is the awareness of its fragility, fleetingness and the eventual moving on from the person who meant the world to you. Most persuasive is how the depth of feelings, however momentary, can unlock the creativity within and take it to new heights as it does in the case of Johanne.
The four actors lend perfect poise to the drama as the camera plays with their faces and the expressions that flit on them. Emnetu’s Johanna is gorgeously radiant, making her student’s attraction for her entirely believable. Øverbye as Johanne is rightly cocky, mature for her age yet vulnerable and sensitive, all at once. A wonderfully well-calibrated, alluring and captivating performance.