Rising temperatures, prickling skin, longing’s all-consuming ache: first love’s swooning symptoms overtake 17-year-old Johanne (Ella Øverbye) in the Golden Bear-winning Dreams, the first UK release from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Stories trilogy. Love and Sex complete the thematically interwoven sequence, which unpick assumptions about sexual identity with gentle irony.
Johanne’s lengthy voiceover relates her romantic awakening first by a French novel then her new French teacher, the felicitously named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). Johanne emotionally shoots up fast as she feels herself “melt” into this vibrant classroom vision, “growing…as if I was turning into someone else”. Haugerud’s camera draws uncharacteristically close, luxuriating in the lustrous golden glow of Johanne’s flat, where the schoolgirl begins an affair conducted largely in her mind and via intimate knitting lessons, as jumpers are shrugged off and on in the apartment’s sultry heat.
Even as the camera reflects Johanne’s subjective obsession, Haugerud’s script reserves ambiguity, from her voiceover’s true provenance to the memoir we first presume it to be, and whatever really happened as tactile knitwear brushed on the teacher’s sofa. “The only thing I wanted was to touch her,” Johanne sighs. Wary of legal consequences, can Johanna be so honest?
Haugerud’s deliberately utopian trilogy isn’t interested in the fraught realities of even an imagined student-teacher affair, but the potential of our best sexual natures. Øverbye, previously impressive as a schoolgirl who accidentally kills a classmate in Haugerud’s Beware of Children (2019), conveys Johanne’s simply selfish devotion and childish frustration at its denial. Her innocent intelligence is the teenage prize Haugerud retrieves, an intense idealism elusive later.
Dreams expands perspectives to Johanne’s mum Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp, pictured above with Øverbye) and poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen, pictured below right). Kristin enviously sees her desultory love life reflected in her daughter’s enraptured book, Karin the hot spark her own writing lacks. Mum embraces the commercial potential of a “queer awakening” memoir, but Johanne refuses the tag. Haugerud’s quiet sexual radicalism frees everyone, gay or straight, from narrow identities.
Haugerud is also an acclaimed novelist, with an acute ear for the comedy of his bourgeois milieu, where generational principles clash. Christian, feminist Karin recalls her dashed hopes for Flashdance ("Finally, a film about a female welder!”), compounded by Kristin’s childhood enjoyment of Jennifer Beals' sexy, hair-flinging heroine. “It’s not right to enjoy something so wrong,” Gran still contends, invoking the Nuremberg Rallies.
Dreams adds to the trilogy’s lovestruck exploration of Oslo, as Johanne intrepidly ventures from the Botanical Gardens’ sylvan idyll via Motzfeldt Street’s Muslim community to the financial district’s glass canyons, where Johanna enigmatically resides. Haugerud and cinematographer Cecilie Semec magically enrich an Escher-like stairwell lit by firefly bulbs, and the Gardens’ fogbound stairs suggest heavenly realms beyond, where Karin dreams of her sexy, naked, Swedish God, legs generously spread for her sexual resurrection. A glimpse of the stairs’ municipal, graffitied reality hardly dims these alchemical urban visions.
In the city of Haugerud’s dreams, sexuality also has no hard lines, as his young heroine slips from girl to boy and back, blithely crossing convention’s borders in pursuit of pleasure.
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