Dreams · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A teenage girl sits in an ordinary Oslo apartment and reads aloud the thing she wrote about being in love. That is almost the whole movie. The crush itself — Johanne's infatuation with her teacher Johanna — is basically over before the film's real subject starts. What we watch is not the romance but the reading of the romance: a mother and a grandmother bent over a manuscript, deciding whether it is good, whether it is true, whether it can be published. Dag Johan Haugerud has made a film in which criticism is the drama and the love affair is only the raw material. To notice how strange and how modern that is, it helps to borrow a few tools from Gilles Deleuze — not to decode the film, but to name what you are already feeling as you watch it slip its footing.

Start with the obvious: nobody acts. In older movies a person sees a situation and does something to change it — Deleuze called that the movement-image, the whole engine of classical cinema, situation into action into new situation. Dreams runs on the opposite current. Johanne mostly looks, listens, remembers, and writes. She is what Deleuze calls a seer (voyant): a character who can only perceive and endure, for whom no adequate action is available. The infatuation with Johanna is never dischargeable into a plot; it has nowhere to go but onto the page. Those long, patient two-shots the film favors — the camera holding people in conversation rather than dramatizing them, asking you to listen — are what he'd call pure optical and sound situations. Something is registered, deeply, and it does not become behavior. It becomes prose.

And here is where the film gets genuinely radical. The voiceover — Johanne's written account, spoken over the images — does not simply report what we see. The editing, as the dossier puts it, continually tests narrated experience against depicted reality, sometimes confirming it, sometimes quietly undercutting it. Deleuze has a precise phrase for an image that composes its object and then quietly replaces it: crystalline description. The manuscript describes the teacher, the classroom, the transfiguring feeling — and in describing them so beautifully it starts to stand in for whatever actually happened. You lose the ground. Was the teacher really like that? Did that moment occur as narrated, or is this adolescent embellishment, or conscious literary construction? The film refuses to say. That refusal is not a flaw the film forgot to fix; it is the theme. Deleuze would call it the powers of the false — truth and falsity made undecidable, not as a trick but as a creative principle. Cinema had long lived under a quiet contract that the camera doesn't lie, that what's shown is what's so. Dreams voids the contract on purpose, and makes the voiding the point.

When two accounts that can't both be literally true are offered as equally alive — the lived crush and the written crush, the girl on screen and the more articulate consciousness narrating her — that is falsifying narration. Ella Øverbye's performance is doubled exactly this way: the behaving adolescent and the retrospective author of her own feeling, present at once. She is caught, in Deleuze's lovely phrase, in the act of legending — fabulating herself, becoming the author of a life even as she lives it. The grandmother, a published poet, and the mother argue over whether the legend is any good and whether it can be told at all. The household becomes a small court adjudicating the powers of the false.

None of this fell from the sky. The device — voiceover as an autonomous literary text floating free of the image, narration carrying the desire the pictures withhold — is Duras's invention in India Song, where the voices-off detach entirely from the bodies. Chantal Akerman's News from Home reads first-person written prose over plain, available-light shots, fusing text and unembellished image precisely as Dreams stages experience-into-writing. The seated moral self-examination, desire turned into an ethical case study through talk, is Rohmer's grammar from Claire's Knee and Pauline at the Beach. The chamber reckoning between mother and daughter is Bergman's Autumn Sonata. And the guilt of turning a real lover into publishable material is the engine of Allen's Manhattan. Haugerud's specific move is to take these inherited devices and make the argument about them — the publishability, the betrayal, the truth-value — into the actual plot. The voiceover stops being a stylistic layer and becomes the thing on trial.

What did that do to filmmaking? It let a small, talk-driven Norwegian film about a schoolgirl's crush win the Golden Bear by treating the oldest question in art — how does raw feeling become writing, and what do we owe the people we write about — as suspense. It belongs to the 2020s autofiction wave, the cinema next door to Knausgård and Vigdis Hjorth, but it does something those novels can't: it puts the falsifying voice and the flat recorded surface side by side, in the same instant, and lets you watch them fail to agree.

Watch it again and stop trusting the narration. Notice the seam between what she says and what the frame shows — that gap is the whole film. Deleuze hands you a word for the vertigo: the false, not as a lie, but as the power to make something true by writing it well enough.