Dreams · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Dreams is a film where action has already happened before the film truly begins — Johanne's infatuation with her teacher is complete by the time the family gathers to read what she wrote about it, and in this displacement of event into interpretation, Haugerud builds entirely within the time-image. Cecilie Semec's cinematography enforces the condition: stable, unshowy framings of Oslo kitchens and classrooms held in muted northern light are pure optical situations — opsigns & sonsigns — images that do not propel us toward consequence but ask us simply to remain present to duration. We see, but we cannot act; much as the women reading Johanne's manuscript can only talk, the camera refuses to agitate or press. The film's deeper provocation belongs to the powers of the false: Johanne's written account of her desire is simultaneously faithful record and suspect transformation, and the three-generation debate over whether to publish turns on precisely the question Deleuze traced from Nietzsche — not whether the account is true, but what kind of truth-telling it performs. Writing may have betrayed its subject, reshaped it, quietly stolen it from the teacher who lived the other half of the story; the film refuses to adjudicate, making falsification the very engine of its drama. This literary self-consciousness places Haugerud in explicit dialogue with Joachim Trier, whose The Worst Person in the World bequeathed to Oslo cinema a grammar of articulate self-examination — though where Trier propels his protagonist toward crisis and consequence, Haugerud stills the frame entirely and lets language carry all the dramatic weight.