Oslo Stories Trilogy: Dreams Review
Trilogies of films often collate a legion of fans with each release, building on the validation accumulated after each story. Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, The Lord of The Rings, Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Three Colours Trilogy. Director Dag Johan Haugerud, novelist-turned-filmmaker, has decided to do away with traditional release schedules and his Oslo Trilogy—all releasing in the span of one month—begins with Dreams.
Our first instalment in the trilogy opens with an intensely personal monologue from then-16-year-old Johanne, a schoolgirl who dances and reads. She’s self-assured and carries herself with confidence, but a shyness lingers in the corners of her polite smile. Set against Oslo’s urban dynamism, Johanne is captivating. She feels mature and relatable, even as she unspools her desires through narration. It’s clear Haugerud has experience as a novelist – Dreams could as easily be read as it is watched.
As both Johanne and the viewer begin to learn who she is, new French teacher Johanna sparks something in Johanne. Through a delicate and often-disregarded female lens, Haugerud explores the difficulties of adolescent passion and explorations of forbidden love. These themes don’t always tend to be well-crafted—especially when made by male filmmakers—but the delicateness of Haugerud’s script offers Johanne the loudest voice of all: telling her story of desire through a 95-page book that she writes herself.
Intimate and personal, her story comes as a shock to her mother, but brings curiosity to her grandmother. Through the exposure of both Johanne’s true feelings and true talent simultaneously, she is no longer the main storyteller—a narrative turn that perhaps puts the brakes on an almost-unstoppable momentum from Haugerud. Ella Øverbye’s performance as Johanne is elevated by the sheer honesty the script affords her—a transparency you cannot choose but to engage with. As soon as her mother, Johanna’s, or her grandmother’s motivations and desires become known, this transparency is clouded and Johanne’s story—along with that minimal yet memorable dynamism—slips away.
Haugerud’s first instalment holds promise in the efforts to expand, rather than duplicate, the coming-of-age genre; even if most of its value is held in its script and its almost fully female cast. It is evident from Dreams – a story that successfully tows the line between relatability and discomfort—that sentimentality, yearning and disappointment are unifying across languages, across ages. Haugerud has succeeded in crafting a memorable story, even if it is mostly Johanne’s words that steal the show.
★★★
In UK cinemas August 1st / Ella Øverbye, Selome Emnetu, Ane Dahl Torp, Anne Marit Jacobsen / Dir: Dag Johan Haugerud / Modern Films / 12A
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