The dynamic between student and teacher can be a charged, intimate one even in its most appropriate form: As children, we spend so much time with our educators, and are so dependent on their attention and approval, that the relationship can evolve into fast loathing or quasi-familial affection — an impression, either way, that often lives far longer in the memory than whatever it is they taught us.
For naive 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye), an instant affinity with her new teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) begins with the similarity of their names, before she projects a far deeper emotional bond between them. Or perhaps she isn’t projecting at all. Intricately shaded and unfailingly sensitive on a volatile subject, Dag Johan Haugerud‘s “Dreams” captures the disorienting bifocal lens of first love, where on the one hand, the world around you becomes a hormonal haze, while on the other, you see more clearly into yourself than ever before.
The light touch that Haugerud applies to hefty matters of the heart comes as no surprise in “Dreams,” the final instalment in the novelist-turned-filmmaker’s trilogy of films examining romance and intimacy in contemporary Norway. The previous two, “Sex” and “Love,” were likewise characterized by the simultaneous restraint and nonjudgmental candor with which they portrayed human urges ripe for more sensationalistic treatment. But that unimpeachable delicacy goes double for “Dreams,” the only coming-of-age story among the three, as well as the only one centered exclusively on female desire. (Until the late appearance of a key character from “Love” that reps a rare connective thread between these otherwise freestanding works, there’s nary a man on screen here.)
As suggested by its positioning in the collective onscreen title “Sex Dreams Love,” “Dreams” was actually intended to be the second in the trilogy, though the vagaries of festival selection made it the last to premiere internationally — in competition at the Berlinale, a full year after “Sex” unspooled at the same fest in the lower-profile Panorama sidebar. This promotion in status is indicative of the interest and admiration that Haugerud’s highly distinctive project has accumulated over the year, as it presents distributors with a surfeit of release-plan options.
“Dreams,” however, feels like the potential breakout title: the most emotionally legible and least narratively diffuse of the three, shot through with the kind of warm, generation-specific melancholy that made fellow Norwegian title “The Worst Person in the World” an arthouse hit. (The frosted, wintry pastels of Cecilie Semec’s lensing further distinguish the film from the springy airiness of its predecessors.)
“My life is in a cloud,” muses Johanne at the outset of a voiceover that runs through the entire film — its often fanciful, literary quality snapping into place once we realize she’s reading a confessional first-person text. Until writing them down, she regards her feelings as elusive and invisible, unreadable to anyone but herself — though like many a teen her age, she oscillates wildly between secretive reserve and heart-on-sleeve vulnerability. Up until now, romantic love is something Johanne has only known vicariously through classic literature, but when she first steps into Johanna’s classroom, she immediately senses it for real: “I could feel her presence all through my body,” she says, and the infatuation only intensifies from there.
Johanna is herself young, pretty and cultivates a casual, friendly rapport with her students: Johanne’s crush is hardly surprising, though it’s plenty confusing to her. She bristles later when her single mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), in an attempt to be open-minded, describes it as “a queer awakening” — Johanne doesn’t specifically identify as queer, and having never fallen in love before, is loath to define herself based on a single, albeit seismic, experience. The best way to make sense of it, she finds out, is to write it down: not in scrappy diary form, but as a lyrical prose account with herself as the protagonist.
How much of the detailed novella that emerges from her heartache is truth and how much is fantasy is hard to gauge, particularly once Johanne makes the bold move of turning up at her teacher’s home — cuing a series of friendly hangouts, under the guise of extra-curricular knitting lessons, that the besotted girl believes must be leading to something more. For much of the film, Johanna is viewed only through her student’s eyes, and we assume, perhaps condescendingly, that a level of delusion is at play.
Yet as Haugerud’s wry, articulate script deftly expands to include other perspectives — including those of Kristin, of Johanne’s liberal-minded poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and eventually of Johanna herself — the picture grows fuzzy and fraught. Is Johanna knowingly exploiting her young charge, or tactfully trying not to wound her? Is Johanne misleading herself, or the only one to see what’s there? An astonishingly poised, easily bruised performance by Øverbye (already a promising presence in Haugerud’s 2019 film “Beware of Children”) keeps all these possibilities afloat behind the character’s soft, inquisitive mien.
Away from Johanne’s turbulent inner life, her writing also seeds tensions between — and within — her elders, as Karin sees and appreciates its prodigious literary value, while Kristin reads only a sequence of increasingly alarming revelations about her daughter. The ensuing push-pull between them culminates in the film’s single most hilarious scene, an exquisite excavation of decades-old sore points pivoting on, of all things, the feminist merits (or not) of “Flashdance.”
Haugerud’s writing is consistently surprising and elastic in its reach, as it picks out common insecurities and gaping ideological differences between three generations of women — but reserves its most piercing compassion for the youngest of them. As the precocious writer in Johanne learns to enjoy the unfamiliar shape and contours of a broken heart, the impetuous girl in her aggrievedly swears that she’ll never love quite this way again. She may be right. But “Dreams” leaves her, and us, with plenty to feel besides.
