WHILE NOT an LGBT event, the Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) always offers plenty of grist for this magazine’s mill. My annual dash around P’town turned up several films that I found worthy of consideration for review. Here’s the third of five.
DREAMS (Sex Love)
Directed by Dag Johan Haugerud
Motlys, Viaplay Group
Dreams is a contemporary drama centering on a female high school student that becomes an exploration of three generations of women and a sublimated lesbian love affair. The story is told through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Johanne, who records her intense thoughts and feelings about her French teacher Johanna (almost the same name) in a diary, mixing dreams and real events in a way that will later cast a shadow on their relationship.
What’s certain is that Johanne has a massive crush on her teacher and longs to have an intimate connection. But longing is not the same as doing, and while Johanne spends many hours in Johanna’s flat—mostly learning how to knit—the extent of their physical interaction is unclear. This ambiguity comes to the fore after Johanne shares the memoir with her grandmother, who shows it to Johanne’s mother. The older woman sees it as a harmless crush, while the mother raises questions of propriety and even criminality on the teacher’s part. Both women are writers, and both are impressed by the memoir’s literary merit. Gram shows the manuscript to her publisher, who loves it, but she suddenly turns against the project (professional jealousy?) and withholds this information from her granddaughter, even as the mother is beginning to see it as the opening salvo in her daughter’s literary career.
The film’s technique, which is brilliantly executed, is to intersperse narrative passages from the memoir with actual dialog or other interaction between the characters. The latter serves as a reality check on the intense feelings and vulnerabilities of a fifteen-year-old girl in love and helps to separate her fantasies from the tamer reality. And yet, as the film’s title, Dreams, suggests, the truth is never as cut-and-dried as it appears.
