Dreams (Sex Love) second look review: vividly captures the dizzying highs and lows of first love

“These days, I rarely think about her. And when I do, it’s happy thoughts. Because it was so nice. Very painful, but mostly wonderful. That’s why I wrote it down. To keep it with me. I know I will never forget it, but memories change. I thought if I found the right words to describe it exactly as it was, I could capture it, make it solid. Something I could hold in the palm of my hand forever.”

For high-schooler Johanne (Ella Øverbye), the motivation for writing a novel about her hazy affair with her French teacher Johanna (Selome Emnetu) might be more complex and less obvious than her poetical declaration suggests. Her version of events – framed in misty, dream-like sequences resembling shards of her fragmented memory – is part burning recollections, part fabrication and part wish-fulfilment. Her factual reliability as a narrator is always in question, but it doesn’t matter, since the authenticity and truthfulness of what she felt over the course of that tumultuous and formative year is what matters to herself, to her mother and grandmother, to her readers and to us, the viewers.

Dreams is the concluding chapter of one of the most engrossing European film trilogies in recent years – a collection of comic dramas exploring some of the most pertinent dimensions of coupledom, romance and sex. Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy – Reprise (2006), Oslo, August 31st (2011) and The Worst Person in the World (2021) – has seized global public attention thanks to emotional gravitas and moments of breathtaking film magic. In comparison, Dag Johan Haugerud’s trilogy of the Norwegian capital is less flashy, more naturalistic in its narrative structures and dialogue, more visually grounded and less assuming. Both filmmakers eye transcendence, but if Trier has Bergman in mind, Haugerud is more Rohmerian in both his unfussy if meticulously modulated visuals and in the long, witty and expressively transparent dialogue.

Haugerud has been one of Norway’s best-kept secrets since long before his Oslo trilogy. An acclaimed novelist, he moved into filmmaking at the beginning of the century. His earlier output was characterised by its formal inventiveness – still present but unobtrusive in the deceptively streamlined trilogy. I Belong (2012) is a multi-character drama, I’m the One You Want (2014) a 53-minute straight-to-camera confession, Barn (aka Beware the Children, 2019) a 150-minute classroom morality tale, and The Light from the Chocolate Factory (2020) is a Godardian quasi-musical.

Collectively, this Oslo trilogy is Haugerud’s richest work to date: a wry, expansive treatise on gender politics, the politics of sexual fluidity and the moral conundrums underlying modern relationships. In Sex (2024), a chimney-sweep must contend with the consequences for his 20-year-old marriage of a sudden hook-up with another man; meanwhile, his co-worker grapples with the puzzling pleasure he experiences from a recurring dream about David Bowie. In Love (2024), the philosophical and moral implications of casual sex are examined through the story of a physician refusing to codify her love life; meanwhile, her nurse colleague develops unanticipated feelings for one of his patients.

Dreams is a most rewarding cumulation of recurrent themes and preoccupations in Haugerud’s previous pictures: the difficulty of intergenerational bonds; the confusing manifestations of love; the mutability of sexual identity; and the subtle power dynamics of amorous relationships.

A primary criticism of Sex and Love revolves around the artificial cleanness of dialogue that never overlaps, delivered by characters who enunciate far more clearly than the average middle-class European. Haugerud eliminates this element in Dreams by anchoring the film mostly in Johanne’s perspective, underscoring the agency she gains from her turbulent romantic quest.

Johanne alludes to Janine Boissard’s 1979 novel L’Esprit de famille as an inspiration. But a more palpable literary reference for Haugerud is Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (1977). Taking a leaf from the French semiotician, Haugerud vividly captures the dizzying highs and lows of first love: the heightened fixation on every gesture of the beloved; the lies one forges and potentially believes to attract attention or to soothe one’s anguish; the scenarios the beloved’s smile inspires of a rosy future that can never be; the endless torturous wait; the placement of the beloved in the centre of one’s existence; the torment of rejection. Dreams is specific in its queer characterisation and coming-of-age framework, but the romantic experience it portrays transcends gender, sexual orientation and age.

Haugerud’s work is fuelled by shrewdly tackled relationship politics. He has already explored school politics in Barn, which also featured Emnetu as a teacher and a young Øverbye, in her breakthrough performance, playing a guilt—ridden student who has accidentally killed her schoolmate. Central to the questions Dreams poses is whether Johanna may have led her student on. Even if Johanne instigated the romance, which may or may not have been consummated, does it absolve the teacher from a neglect of her duties?

Dreams is Haugerud’s second film to feature an age-gap romance, after I’m the One You Want (2014), which centres on a teacher who falls for her 15-year-old student. In both cases, Haugerud refrains from judgement, especially about sex. His moral concerns have to do more with the responsibility of unexamined power and how it’s wielded in forms too convoluted for easy attribution of blame.

Johanne comes across as a force of idealism thrust into a capitalist universe she feels alienated from. She mentions the unfrequented botanical gardens and the soulless restaurants and shops along gentrified Motzfeldts gate in Oslo, where Johanna lives. Her novel compels her mother and grandmother to realise that the same forces of capitalism – promoted in Hollywood films, in the publishing industry, in mainstream gender politics – have made them compartmentalise and suppress desires and passions deemed superfluous for women of their age.

Storytelling may have aided Johanne’s healing; it may have given her a powerful tool for self-affirmation, for reclaiming the narrative Johanna has never and may never acknowledge, but it couldn’t grant her closure. In writing, in the stories we create, we hope that our former loves, our unrequited loves, would recognise our yearnings, our pain, the damage they’ve done with their emotional shortsightedness. But that never materialises. Instead, we carry on as the pain subsides, and for the lucky few like Johanne, another love – a more profound, more mature, more lasting love – may come along to recompense them for laying their soul bare.

► Dreams (Sex Love) is in UK cinemas 1 August.