Dreams by Dag Johan Haugerud is an exploration of how literature can shape love and obsession, and how the stories we immerse ourselves in can obscure our reality. Haugerud explores this through the relationship between Johanne, a teenager from Oslo, and her teacher, Johanna.
The film opens to Johanne reading L’Esprit de famille, a French novel where the young protagonist falls intensely in love with an older married man. We immediately see Johanne take this as a literary template to build not only her actions throughout the film but also her entire thought process.
Johanna (left), Johanne (right)
Almost everything Johanne does is tied back to how it ‘should’ be, how she imagined herself experiencing it when she read the book. She authors the entire narrative of the relationship, triggering a series of avoidable events that cause her immense suffering. To cope with this, Johanne writes an autobiographical manuscript detailing her entire relationship with Johanna.
Johanne’s mother Kristin and grandmother Karin are equally prominent characters; much of the film consists of back-and-forth discussions between the two of them, reminiscent perhaps of arguments they would have had when Kristin was a child - never aggressive, but conveying a rapid-fire atmosphere of paths well trodden. This gives the film a quietly enjoyable comedy of real human dialogue to interrupt the heavy emotional distress. What is notable about these scenes is how little Johanne speaks. Her mother and grandmother judge her manuscript while rarely asking her to explain herself. They still see her as a young girl, even while reading the writing of someone who describes adult sexual experiences.
Haugerud tells the story through the slow unfurling of Johanne’s autobiographical book, staging the relationship so that blame is perpetually deferred in the viewer’s eyes. This deferral makes the film a guilty watch, as we enter through Johanne’s eyes and feel her affection as our own, but Haugerud slowly pulls us out. By the time Johanna sits down with Kristin for coffee, we are no longer inside Johanne’s dream - we are watching two adults talk about consequences of the actions of a girl who is not in the room to defend herself.
Johanna even suggests to Kristin the theory that the teacher was abused by the pupil, which is unnerving not because it’s obviously false, but because it’s plausible enough to make us reframe the story we’ve been inside for the majority of the film. Johanna’s adult awareness and willingness to entertain the idea that she was the one being abused introduces a question of naive persistence versus adult responsibility that is never fully resolved.
That unresolved question is the film’s most unsettling idea: the stories through which we understand and tell our experiences can feel true to ourselves without showing the whole truth.