How about “” as the headline?
Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Dreams (Sex Love),” which won the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize last winter, is a quintessential writer’s film. Repeating the structure of the other two thirds of his “Love Sex Dreams” trilogy, each scene places two or three people in dialogue. It also features an extensive voice-over. Unlike “Love” and “Sex,” it dives straight into the act of storytelling itself. Not surprisingly, Haugerud turned to filmmaking after a career as a novelist.
After developing a crush on her French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu), 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Overbye) keeps a diary about her experiences. While she gazes longingly at Johanna during class, she devises a way to visit the older woman at home by taking knitting lessons from her. She shows her manuscript to her grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), a poet, who thinks it’s superb. Her mother Kristen (Ane Dahl Torp) is initially less enthused by the text, fearing that Johanne’s been groomed by Johanna.
“Dreams (Sex Love)” couples an overall talkiness with positioning its characters to represent ideas about gender and sex. Although Johanne begins in the position of telling her own story directly to the audience, “Dreams” moves on to other women’s responses. With an almost all-female cast, “Dreams” contrasts generational attitudes between them. Out for a walk, Kristen and Karin recall watching “Flashdance” together in 1984. Karin expected a story about a working-class woman succeeding as a welder and was outraged that she really wanted to be a dancer. Kristen thought it was great fun and just enjoyed the dancing. Even though her mother bought her the soundtrack, she still feels as though her mother poisoned her pleasure in the film. Karin’s still so angry that she compares “Flashdance” to a Nazi rally.
Not just a story, this is an illustration of the differences between second and third wave feminism. But it’s a complex one: Karin isn’t prudish. She speaks about her wish that she’d gotten laid more. She wants Johanne to be able to pursue her own libido but worries about the possibility for exploitation. Still, the film’s potential keeps getting kneecapped by its didactic elements. For all that, Haugerud doesn’t ignore visual language: The enormous set of stairs, cloaked in a mist, at the beginning of his film is a powerful image. It’s dropped back into “Dreams (Sex Love)” at regular intervals.
This is a decidedly post-#metoo movie about girls’ and women’s experiences, avoiding objectifying Johanne or turning lurid. It wants to lay out tough, provocative questions about consent and desire — does Johanna have the right to feel wronged by Johanne touching her, given their age and power imbalance? — but Haugerud’s main impulse is placing ideas in his characters’ mouths. At best, dialogue becomes a form of action. Johanne’s on the cusp of adulthood, but not quite there yet, and the film leaves it open how much of her story was a fantasy. Her mother quickly goes from wondering if she was groomed to deciding her manuscript deserves publication. She tends to think more literally than Johanne: Calling Johanne’s story “a wonderful tale of queer awakening” makes the girl feel as though her sexuality has already been defined for her.
Haugerud has an insider’s knowledge of turning life’s material into a story. In multiple ways, “Dreams (Sex Love)” reflects that. It continues some of the trilogy’s prior tendencies: disinterest in judging its characters, a similar reluctance to pin down their sexual identities. Ultimately, Johanne’s queerness isn’t the film’s main interest in her. But even the spaces where “Dreams (Sex Love)” remains elusive are carefully calculated. Style plays backup to the film’s illustration of its themes, although Haugerud lays them out cleverly. Despite the title, there’s no grand summing up of his work here, just a persistent query regarding desire.
“Dreams (Sex Love)” | Directed by Dag Johan Haugerud | In Norwegian with English subtitles | Strand Releasing | Opens at Film Forum Sept. 12th
