In theaters this Wednesday, July 2, Dreams is a film. It is also an element of a set of three films, Oslo trilogyincluding the other two components, Love And Desirecome out the following two Wednesdays. Each film can obviously be seen for itself, the stories are autonomous. Neither the characters nor the actors are the same, nor social circles. Even if, as its name suggests, everything happens in the Norwegian capital and its immediate proximity.
But, a bit like Three colors Polish Krzysztof Kieślowski (1993-1994) and unlike the other Oslo trilogythat of Joachim Trier (result of an accumulation of titles designed separately), the three films constitute a concerted set, which aims to make an overall proposal.
Dreams is a film, even if we are not immediately certain. The first sequences present a high school student, Johanne, who falls in love with her French teacher and holds in writing the chronicle of her emotions, while hesitating to share it with her mother and her grandmother.
The framing, the voiceover, the simplism of the narrative device first refer more to a socio-psychian sitcom on adolescence than a cinema project. But little by little, in small touches, discrepancies and covers, without much stylistic gesture, but with questions that slide or branch off around the starting situation, it will appear that Dreams is much richer and finer than what seemed at first glance. And that the patterns of TV sitcoms, like those of learning novels, are among the issues, but do not constitute a formatting.
Radical simplifications of the context-there would be that the total elimination of men-and the inscription in a set of the big city, with this scansion of overall real estate plans, motorway exchangers, construction sites which, each time differently, will also punctuate the other two films, allow the Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Hauger to deploy a much larger ambition.
If he tells a teenage love story, Dreams is also and above all an attentive and sensual game around the fact of telling and telling oneself by different, verbal, written, gestural means, what we experience, in the moment and in duration, in memory. But it is also a question of questioning the ways of telling with images and sounds, which are the film itself.
“Love” and “desire” extend the connections
Common sign of the three films, everyone has a public show: a choreography on a staircase at the foot of the buildings in Dreamsa concert on the roof of the town hall in Lovechoral singing in Desire.
A little too supported, this echo is less interesting than the urban and social geography that each film deploys and the continuity established by the trilogy as a whole, thanks to the journeys (tram, bicycle, walking, ferry) of the protagonists and the overall plans on the city.
This city is not all Oslo, a city of which a quarter of the population is made up of immigrants, even less Norway. It is a huge network of people, places and behaviors under the sign of an easy, liberal, educated middle class, which perceives itself as available to the diversity of identities and lifestyles.
And it is an environment confronted, in fact, that masks or questions this apparent flexibility, this benevolence of principle with differences, in particular sexual practices and intimate relationships.
Everyone is beautiful and kind in Lovethe urologist doctor who spends her days to announce to men that they have prostate cancer and who refuses a couple life, like her gay nursing colleague who flirts on Tinder on board the ferry which connects the city to the idyllic datcha where he crèche on the other side of the fjord.
She will meet him according to paths which will take them out of the representations that he and they made themselves, but also in manners to thwart the expectations of spectators. No cunning or research of a script or spectacular shot in these unexpected differences, but on the contrary the proposal that at any situation, there are various developments and which deserve to be told, or lived.
The two main protagonists of Desire are modern sweeps, work companions on roofs and in depths of their sexuality, their family life, their relationship to God. They are expressed with attentive and respectful clairvoyance (others, unknown shares of the impulses of each and everyone) to make the desire of experienced shrinks. To the point that a brutal, visceral reaction, on the part of the wife of one of the two vibrates as a relief.
In the original version, this third film is more appropriate Sex. These are not “sex scenes”, absent from the whole trilogy, but gendered codes, as well as anatomical aspect. Yet there is also a question of desires, what we know, what we say, what we do with his desire and that of others.
The dreams – more present in this film that in the one who wore the title – and love – in the three in various forms -, but also the fear of death and religion, relaunch the circulation of affects and questions, with an essential place devolved to words. Thus circulate the patterns and the questions, in each film and in the trilogy, as fluidly as the various vehicles which continue to travel the big city and its districts.
It is the amazing work accomplished by Oslo trilogyat the antipodes of the roasting coarseness of another Scandinavian director, Ruben Ötslund. Each Dag Johan Haugerud film and all three in a subtle way a assembly of consideration for values of respect, attention, civility, but also critical irony on their caricatured or perverse effects. Looking without judging him an environment of which we suspect that he is a part and that he knows it, the filmmaker also identifies the cracks or the abyss of loneliness, anxiety, of violence which are inexorably widening there.
Neither cynical nor angelica, the trilogy in each of its components, as as a whole, also touches by its manifest incompleteness. Barely sketched, the presence however very visible in the city, with their pink fuchsia uniforms, bicycle delivery people, like the silence of one of them to which has just been brought down a terrifying new, is one of the signs that the world, or even this part of the world, is not limited to the three lighting thus assembled.
Having constantly thwarted all the forms of statement overlooking or totaling, often amused and tenderly tender of the errors and dead ends as legitimate attempts and decent choices, the promenade through the city to meet some of its inhabitants remain on the side of life.
