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Film festival juries are often unpredictable and often arbitrary. Each year, a handful of largely unknown, diverse figures from the world of cinema—directors, writers, actors, and sometimes critics—come together to create a semblance of consensus. However, certain organizational principles can help to foster this consensus. At events like the Berlin International Film Festival, known as the Berlinale, the main competition typically features both established auteurs and emerging talent—an arrangement that, at the risk of generalizing, I would argue, often favors newcomers. Familiarity with an experienced director does not breed disdain, but it can dampen excitement or lead to unfavorable comparisons with earlier work. A lesser-known artist comes without such baggage, and the thrill of bold discovery can therefore be difficult to resist.
Norwegian writer and director Dag Johan Haugerud, who won the Golden Bear, the top prize at this year’s Berlinale, is certainly a revelation, although at sixty years old and with several short and feature films under his belt, he’s hardly a newcomer. He won over the international jury, led by director Todd Haynes, with Dreams (Sex Love), a lyrical, touching and slightly provocative comedy about the joys and risks of teenage love. The film, whose original Norwegian title is Drømmer, is the third part of a loosely connected trilogy; the first two, Sex and Love, were screened at the 2024 Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, respectively. I haven’t seen either of the films, and I don’t know if the jury had them in mind, but I suspect that doesn’t matter. While “Dreams (Sex Love)” left me eager to see the rest of the trilogy, it's an undeniably dreamy experience in its own right.
Much of the story is told through the eyes of Johanna (Ella Everbye), a quiet, insightful seventeen-year-old who falls in love with her French teacher, also named Johanna (Selome Emnetou). The voiceover underscores and amplifies various striking details: Johanna’s casual demeanor and ethereal beauty; the unbearable jealousy that erupts when her teacher becomes close to other students; the deeper connection that forms when Johanna impulsively decides to visit Johanna’s apartment. This kind of interior monologue is often considered an inherently uncinematic device—an assumption to which Dreams (Sex Love) provides an immersive refutation. Haugerud, also a novelist, has a keen ear for dialogue, and Johanna’s words, crucially, never duplicate or replace the visuals. The film's precise relationships between image and sound create vivid insights, cascading textures and emotional depth, and ultimately a mesmerizing, almost musical flow.
The narrative is also key to the playful yet rigorous literary design. We soon realize that we have been hearing, in part, fragments of a manuscript that Johanna has written about her relationship with Johanna, a project she seems to have undertaken in the spirit of an exorcism. Was Johanna’s love unrequited; if not, how far did it go, and what legal or ethical boundaries, if any, were crossed? Which part of the manuscript should we believe first? We are not the only ones pondering these questions; in one of the film’s most moving moments, Johanna shows the manuscript to her grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and her mother (Anne Dahl Thorpe), in that order. Their reactions display a surprising complexity of range: shock and dismay, of course, but also fascination, bewilderment, and justified admiration for Johanna’s gift for writing.
When the possibility of the manuscript being published emerges, the characters’ responses, including a hilariously abrupt U-turn on the mother’s part, become an ironic and surprising commentary on the decades-long practice—sometimes sincere, sometimes self-serving, sometimes both—of using one’s own experiences for art. It’s characteristic of the characters’ prescient wisdom, as well as of Haugerud’s, that while they acknowledge differences in age and power, Johanna’s attraction to another woman is not treated as particularly noteworthy in itself, or as a fixed point of identity. At its core, Dreams (Sex Love) understands that desire, in whatever form it manifests itself, rarely fits neatly into expected boxes. By placing three generations of women in such a warm and frank conversation, it shatters more than a few of its own boundaries.
Sourse: newyorker.com
