Drømmer (Dreams) review – teen's high romantic hopes throw adults into disarray

The Guardian

19-02-2025

Here is the third in a playful trilogy from Norwegian novelist and film-maker Dag Johan Haugerud (after Sex and Love, which appeared last year at Berlin and Venice respectively). This one is a sly, garrulous, mischievous piece with something of Lukas Moodysson's early film Show Me Love; it saunters lightly and entertainingly along, breaking all the screenplay-seminar rules against voiceovers (of which it has lengthy stretches but it never feels oppressive). I can imagine two different sorts of US English-language remake: one which ramps up the wry indie comedy, and another which transfers the emphasis to a dead-serious generational family drama. Neither would have this insouciant flavour.
The setting is Oslo and Ella Øverbye plays Johanne, a 17-year-old at high school who is dissatisfied with her life; she lives with single mum Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp) and is also close to her grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen). Her world is turned upside–down with the arrival of new teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) who is dynamic, charismatic and attractive. Dreamy Johanne nurses a crush on her that escalates to obsession and she becomes deeply in love with this beautiful, inspirational teacher – which plunges her into depression. In desperation, Johanne goes round to see Johanna uninvited, knocks tearfully on her door and Johanna opens it and hugs her, apparently instantly empathetic. Or is there something more? …
The key thing is that we are finding out about this (but not all of it) after the event. Johanne has written a sensationally intimate memoir of their relationship that she nervously shows in manuscript to her grandmother Karin, a published poet whose own literary career is in fact fizzling; Karin then shows it to Johanne's astonished mother. Both hardly know what to think and have tense conversations about whether or not the later, more explicit parts are real or made up: just 'dreams'. The director toys with us, not showing these later scenes yet, and letting us wonder if we will ever see them at all.
But the older women's concerns are not merely pastoral. The film shows us that both are astounded at Johanne's story for different reasons. Karin sees that as a writer and perhaps also as a human being she herself has been timid and tepid compared to her granddaughter; Johanne's literary work – so daring, so vulnerable – shows her to have more passion and more talent. Kristin, who is at first outraged at evidence of what could be considered abuse but is perhaps nothing of the kind, also comes to respect this extraordinary achievement and thinks publication might be a good idea; she is also clearly uneasy at her own lukewarm emotional life of tentative online dates. She has an amusingly tense conversation with Johanna, who smilingly airs the theory that the pupil could be said to be abusing the teacher.
Certainly, that issue might come up if the memoir was published. But would publishing a book like this be a dream come true? A glorious entree into the world of literary celebrity, like Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse? Maybe not. This is an amiably talky film, and yet I never for a moment considered that the central relationship was being presented with anything less than seriousness, and there is much dry comedy to be enjoyed.
Drømmer (Dreams) screened at the Berlin film festival.