Dreams

Bluesky

It may not have been used as a title but one thing that all three of Dag Johan Haugerud’s loose trilogy Sex, Dreams, Love share is desire, which ripples in all its forms under each of them. Dreams - the intended second part of the trilogy, although the last to make its bow internationally, at Berlin, where it won the Golden Bear - is focused on the fuzzy spot where desire and reality meet in the mind of a teenager.

This means that Dreams, more than Love and Sex, operates in spaces that often feel more liminal than concrete - a choice indicated right from the first moments when the camera observes a set of stairs on a misty day. Not only are they a transient space in and of themselves, but also shrouded and with no indication of either how far they run or what their end point is - a graceful and subtle metaphor for all that will follow.

Johanne (Ella Øverbye) is at that age when the idea of romance still trumps your actual life experience of it and when love can hit like a tidal wave. When a new teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) arrives in school, even the similarity of their names makes it feel like a connection that was meant to be for the youngster, who quickly develops an ardent crush.

Haugerud takes a novelistic approach to this courtesy of narration that comes from Johanne’s perspective and guides us through the film’s opening section. He’s always had a style that you sense aims to teach an audience something while it’s entertaining them but he’s become a lot more adept at threading this gracefully through his work so that even though the ideas in Dreams are dense, they feel much more lightly handled than the themes of his earlier work Beware Of The Children and even his first instalment of this trilogy, Sex. He says he wrote Sex, Dreams, Love in chronological order and, for me at least, the elegance of his writing has improved as he has gone along.

By immersing us in the 17-year-old’s thoughts, Haugerud shows how her desire for the older woman leads to her showing up on her doorstep, making return visitors afterwards on the pretext of knitting lessons. What happens next forms the basis for a racy memoir - although whether it is a document of fact or a work of fiction remains up for debate for the rest of the film.

Though written for herself, with this episode of first love in the rearview mirror, Johanne decides to share it with her poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), who views it, first and foremost, as an impressive piece of prose. Her mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), meanwhile, when she comes to read it, is much more alarmed by what she suspects may be the grooming of her daughter. As a writer, Haugerud is adept at discursive dialogue, with the women’s conversations around Johanne’s memoir opening out into a discussion of everything from mother daughter relationships and feminism - via Flashdance, of all things - to gender identity while still retaining humour and naturalism.

Haugerud's direction - and work with cinematographer Cecilie Semec, who shot all three films in the trilogy in radically different styles - should also not be underrated. They work in tandem with strong production and costume design to make wool the dominant element during Johanne’s early encounters with Johanna at the teacher’s home. Johanna wears elaborate chunky knitwear - in contrast with Kristin’s much more workaday knits - and wool-woven elements hang about her flat. This, plus the oversized scarf repeatedly worn by Johanne give the film a tactile quality, making us want to reach out and touch Johanna, in particular, almost as much as Johanne does. The fuzzy note also lends Johanna’s place a slightly ‘heightened’ sensation - as though it has been at least somewhat romanticised by Johanne, a feeling that is only endorsed by a later return to the flat when it is shown in a much cooler light.

Øverbye - who made her screen debut in Beware Of The Children - makes a compelling lead, taking on the chunks of voiceover without any problem but also excelling in terms of conveying her character’s moods via body language. She also lets us see a genuine shift in the young woman’s attitude and confidence through the course of the film. Those stairs we see at the start, are part of a leitmotif. They twist steeply up through the park, a challenge to be climbed but also appear in a transportive dream sequence, which reminds us that though our desires may shift over time they stay with us long after we’ve scrambled out of our teenage years.