‘Dreams’ Review: An Insightful Norwegian Trilogy About Intimacy Concludes With a Piercing Study of Queer First Love
There’s a scene at the start of Dreams (Dr?mmer) in which 17-year-old Johanne, played with churning depths of melancholy introspection by Ella ?verbye, explains to an instructor after a modern dance class why she didn’t try classical ballet: “Because I read somewhere that it’s about outdated gender attitudes and it should be banned.” The droll humor embedded in that sweeping, unironic dismissal — with its wry dig at the rigid codification of 21st century sexual politics and its absolute authority despite only the vaguest recollection of its source — is characteristic of Dag Johan Haugerud’s smart, sensitive queer coming-of-age story.
The film is the concluding chapter of the talented Norwegian writer-director’s trilogy about emotional and physical intimacy. That he’s made three thematically related but narratively distinct features in a year is remarkable enough; that they are all terrific, even more so. All three are extremely talky, but Haugerud has a knack for making rivers of dialogue fluid, dynamic and cinematic.
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The trilogy began with Sex, which premiered in the Panorama section of the 2024 Berlinale and focused on two ostensibly straight married men discovering that their sexual identities are more elastic than they realized. Next came Love, which bowed in the main competition of the Venice Film Festival last fall and followed two hospital colleagues — a heterosexual woman and a gay man — on the hunt for sexual and romantic connection in the brave new world of dating apps.
While there are touching forays into the way adolescents navigate codes of masculinity via the teenage sons of the Sex protagonists, the new film is the first to center entirely on a young adult. As such, it has a sweetness alongside its acerbity, a disarming gentleness in exploring Johanne’s feelings. Not that she doesn’t have moments of petulance and self-dramatization.
A large chunk of the character’s experience is related in voiceover narration, which fits the material given that it’s arguably less about Oslo high-schooler Johanne’s all-consuming infatuation with a new teacher, Johanna (Selome Emnetu), than her lyrical account of it in confessional prose. Right down to their similar names, Johanne feels an instant affinity for the cool transplant from the American Midwest via Paris, who sparks a desire previously unknown in the student.
There’s nothing pervy or even remotely judgmental about Haugerud’s handling of the material, and yet Johanne’s sexual and romantic awakening is loaded with palpable yearning. Just the way she contemplates Johanna’s chunky knits and the direct contact of wool on the teacher’s skin is dreamily sensual. She describes feeling Johanna’s presence inside her body, a strange sensation that she doesn’t yet fully understand.
The besotted student starts going out of her way to bump into her new teacher, seeking her out in the school’s corridors or staff areas or outdoor spaces. In one scene both touching and amusing, she kicks herself when she sees two fellow students giving Johanna a birthday gift of a hand-knitted scarf. Her frustration — along the lines of “Why didn’t I think of that?” and “Why can’t I knit?” — is low-key hilarious.
For anyone with sharp recollections of the heady rush of first love and the obsessive fixation on one person to the exclusion of all else, Dreams will strike chords. As will the crushing blow of heartbreak and the irrational jealousy and anger directed at anyone who gets close to that person.
Johanne starts having dark thoughts of other students joining Johanna in a knitting circle to which she’s not invited. The weight of those hormonal storm clouds is channeled in Anna Berg’s score, with lush romantic swells over a subtly disquieting undertow.
Needing a release, Johanne tracks down her teacher’s address and resolves to confess her feelings. But she bursts into tears on arrival, and in a very funny interaction, nods in agreement when Johanna suggests she’s probably overwhelmed by the pressures of school. A positive development comes out of it when Johanna offers to teach her to knit. She starts skipping dance class to go to the teacher’s apartment, intoxicated by her physical proximity to the beautiful older woman.
A year later, Johanne has penned a revealing romantic memoir about her first love. Or is it a novella? The balance of fact, embellishment and total fabrication is kept tantalizingly in flux. Where Haugerud really mines laughs is in the responses first of Johanne’s grandmother, Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), and later her single mother, Kristen (Ane Dahl Torp), to the material.
While they express surprise, neither of the older women are remotely fazed by the revelations of queer desire — this is Norway, not North Dakota — about which Johanne makes no decisive declarations. But Kristen goes into a mini tailspin over the possibility that her daughter has been sexually abused by an adult, making noises about reporting the teacher. There’s a lot of humor, however, in how easily persuaded she is by Karin’s insistence that Johanne’s manuscript is not written from a victim’s perspective, quickly getting on board with the idea that it could be published and become an important feminist text.
Even more tickling, however, is Karin’s evolving reaction, played with inextinguishable spirit by the wonderful Jacobsen. A published poet, Johanne’s Nan gets excited over the literary potential of the piece as it sparks vivid recollections of her own early experiences of love and sex. Kristin also is nudged to consider her past choices. There’s a pleasing trilogy symmetry in Haugerud’s focus for the first time here exclusively on female desire, with men relegated to the periphery.
In the movie’s funniest scene, while Kristin and Karin are taking a walk in the woods, the daughter reprimands her mother for giving her such a hard time over wanting to see Flashdance when she was 10. Karin counters that as a woman who marched on the feminist frontlines, she found the movie’s reinforcement of female stereotypes offensive.
There’s also a great deal of humor in Karin’s professional jealousy when her editor shows more enthusiasm for Johanne’s writing than she ever has for her own manuscripts. Hilariously, Nan plays down the editor’s response when she reports back to Johanne.
As a necessary courtesy, Kristin and Karin insist that Johanna must be allowed to read the text before it’s published. If there’s a minor flaw in the screenplay, it’s the slightly schematic note of having this ineffably chill queer woman bristle at the idea that she might be the one who was sexually abused. But as a prism for Haugerud’s reflections on the power dynamics of attraction, Johanna is otherwise a sharply drawn character, played by Emnetu with the relaxed openness of a woman fully comfortable in her own skin, a seductive quality in itself.
Of the three films, Dreams is the one that taps most directly into the director’s background as a novelist. His contemplation of the way we think and write about our memories as a means of making them real and holding onto them — particularly as they pertain to first love — is one of the movie’s emotional stealth weapons. It’s also a nice touch that a psychologist character from Love (Lars Jacob Holm) makes a brief but enlightening appearance late in the action.
Cinematographer Cecilie Semec, who shot all three parts of the trilogy, again brings crisp edges and warmth to the Oslo settings. She finds an expressive motif in striking modern architecture, most notably staircases and stairwells, perhaps representing Johanne’s climb toward emotional maturity, but also suggesting in a vivid dream of Nan’s that the struggle is ongoing.
Haugerud’s Sex/Love/Dreams trilogy — three overlapping words cleverly incorporated into the main title sequence — is an impressive achievement that’s admirable for the intricate layering of its themes and the overall lightness of touch. Savvy programmers and arthouse distributors should be lining up to play the three films as a package.
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