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At the heart of Dreams (Sex Love)s Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a young student in Oslo who experiences the overwhelming intensity of her first love for Johanna (Selome Emnetu), her French teacher. This love, both electrifying and impossible, leads Johanne to write a deeply personal diary that blurs the lines between fiction and reality. When she shares her creation with her grandmother, a poet, and later with her mother, her private narrative becomes public. What was once her personal journey now belongs to everyone who reads it, forever altering its meaning.
Unlike films that show the same events from multiple perspectives, Dreams (Sex Love) captures the shift from personal experience to public interpretation. Haugerud draws from his own adolescent memories, portraying love not just as an emotional experience, but also as a creative process. The film shows us how once a story is shared, it begins to slip away from its creator, becoming something more. It highlights the difficulty of separating fact from fiction, especially when telling a story influenced by personal imagination.
What happens to Johanne mirrors a universal truth about storytelling: once a story is shared, control over it is lost. Written words are never entirely "true"—they're always mixed with omissions, misinterpretations, and personal embellishments. Haugerud explores this delicate balance between reality and artistic creation, revealing how the process of storytelling is never as simple as it seems.
But Dreams (Sex Love) isn’t just about Johanne's first love; it's a nuanced exploration of how different generations experience love, desire, and truth. Johanne’s mother and grandmother, initially shocked by the revelation that Johanne has fallen in love with her teacher, eventually begin to reflect on their own lives and experiences. The three women engage in a delicate dance of vulnerability, lies, and small deceptions, all while coming to terms with their personal desires. Haugerud deftly portrays how love, at any age, remains mysterious and complex.
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The film also tackles a theme that's deeply ingrained in modern culture: the need to define love and emotions. Johanne’s mother, trying to categorize her daughter’s writing, suggests that it’s a "queer manifesto." Johanne, bewildered, doesn’t understand why her romantic feelings for a woman need to be labeled. This witty exchange highlights the complexity of human emotions and challenges the urge to simplify them into neat categories.
With Dreams (Sex Love), Haugerud creates a cinematic experience that evokes the style of Éric Rohmer, with long, carefully crafted dialogues that explore the psychological depths of relationships. However, unlike Rohmer’s works, Dreams (Sex Love) carries a lighter tone. It reflects on art, truth, and fiction in a smooth, fluid manner, without ever feeling heavy. Haugerud’s exploration of love and creation isn’t just intellectual; it has an emotional depth that invites us to reflect on the messy, beautiful reality of human life.
The film’s beauty lies in its ability to navigate between the personal and the universal, between adolescent passion and the wisdom of older generations. Dreams (Sex Love) doesn’t just tell a love story—it offers a meditation on the process of creation itself, the search for truth, and the inevitable distortions that come with it. In the end, the film leaves us with the feeling that, like in all great works of art, the true meaning is always just out of reach, caught between the dream and the waking world.
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