The third part of Dag Johan Haugerud's trilogy, DREAMS (SEX, LOVE), is a slippery, nostalgic and occasionally hilarious movie about a teenager's sexual awakening.
Johanne is a 17-year old schoolgirl who falls desperately in love or in lust with her new French teacher and inveigles herself into Johanna with an A's life. They hang out together at the teacher's apartment and for much of the film we are unsure of what exactly happening. Is Johanne with an E just a naïve schoolkid over interpreting every act of kindness or is she being groomed by a teacher who loves basking in her student's attention. This latter theory is given more weight when we meet another of the teacher's ex-students, though an adult, who says "there are many of us". At this point one wonders how the schoolgirl will react? Mope and sulk or erupt into violence. And I love how quietly ambiguous the film is and for how long it refuses to give any clear answers. Even in a final scene with the schoolteacher it is unclear just how complicit she was in what happened and how we should interpret this teenager's passionate and perhaps imagined love affair.
All of our uneasiness and questioning is given voice by the two older women in Johanne's life - her mother and her grandmother. Indeed, it's worth noting that men are almost entirely absent from this story except as a rather banal looking boyfriend or a rather banal therapist. These scenes of inter-generational tussling are often hilarious but also signal how we, as adults, seek to pigeon-hole and explain and exploit the complex and sometimes unexplainable feelings of teenagers.
These discussions are narratively induced by the fact that Johanne wrote her experience of her love affair in a book that is apparently preciously brilliant, and then gave the manuscript to her published poet grandmother and then to her mother. At first Johanne's mother thinks her child has been the victim of sexual abuse. But she quickly moves to thinking that the brilliant manuscript should be published as a queer feminist coming-of-age story. And in some ways the disagreement between mother and grandmother over whether to publish is far more about their own tussles when the mother was a child than about Johanne at all. I point you to an hilarious argument over the movie FLASHDANCE!
Ella Overbye gives a startlingly assured turn as 17-year old schoolgirl Johanne but all the female performances in this film are strong. I also loved the production design and directorial choices that show us cosy interiors with a romantic gauzy haze and feature endless beautiful architectural shots of staircases.
But this film is not without its flaws. I know that it needs to allow us into Johanne's experience of her love affair but the voiceover of banal teenage thoughts became rather tedious. I found myself clinging on for the comedy scenes between mother and grandmother. I also didn't find her voiceovers to be preciously brilliant (as described by them and by an editor) but to be the usual self-involved meanderings of a teenager. Was this the point? Was it satire? It was nonetheless boring for that.
DREAMS aka DROMMER has a running time of 100 minutes. It won the Golden Bear at the 2025 Berlinale.
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