Refreshingly unexpected, Dag Johan Haugerud’s Dreams (Sex Love) — the first Norwegian film to win the Berlinale’s Golden Bear — breathes new life into the often oversimplified genre of sexual awakening that seems to draw on his twinned career in both cinema and books. This headlong, hyper-nuanced account of a teenage girl’s first love fuses the interiority of novels and the sensuous embrace of cinema in ways that other films fumble. Led by a smartly underplayed performance by Ella Øverbye, this third, stand-alone entry in a trilogy (released in Norway last October) moves engrossingly between her romantic entrancement and insightful commentary, both her own and her family’s.

Seventeen-year-old Johanne (Øverbye) is a subdued, pensive teen who seems swaddled in cozy scarves and the Nordic light, taking in more of the world than she ever says aloud. She’s surprised by her stirrings of interest in a kind, self-effacing French teacher (Selome Emnetu), and lies around simply trying to figure out what’s happening to her. A desire suffuses her, but she gazes at her teacher less as if struck by a lightning bolt and more with the focus of a candle’s glow, quietly mesmerized. Her friends sense something’s brewing and cluelessly suggest a therapy app; Johanne in turn is gripped by the need to reach out to her teacher, with whom she imagines a certain connection that might not be there.

From the start, we’re privy to Johanne’s ruminations in her daily life through the film’s extensive voiceover, which is both written and delivered with a confident fluidity. However overwhelmed and even paralyzed she might feel about her attraction, she’s constantly sorting through her feelings and reactions. When she rashly decides to show up at her teacher’s doorstep, that visit and the ones that follow are dominated by her reflective narration, which, rather than having a distancing effect, attunes us to the mood and physicality of each moment.

Obsessed, Johanne puts her experiences down on paper and entrusts the results to her grandmother, Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen), an erudite poet living among packed bookshelves. Karin’s a sympathetic reader, and less easily shocked than Johanna’s mom, Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), with whom she feels compelled to share the novella-like work. With this sharing of Johanna’s inner world, the female-centered Dreams naturally starts phasing in scenes between mother and grandmother that lie completely outside of the teenager’s perspective, and reveal subtle generational and personal differences.

The older women’s responses keep evolving, but Johanne’s mom does understandably worry that the teacher has abused her daughter (who’s a realistic, adolescent blend of perceptive and naive). It’s worth mentioning that Johanne’s self-discovery is not portrayed in terms of sexual abandon; when she visits her teacher’s flat, it’s (almost laughably) for knitting lessons, which have the feel of a lazy, honeyed-tea afternoon. What she commits to paper is another story, however, with explicit detail that raises both her mother and grandmother’s eyebrows. But whether Johanne’s piece is believed to be true, semi-fiction, idealized, or something else, all feels less important than her own emotionally accurate characterization: it’s about her life.

That points to another awakening which filmmaker-novelist Haugerud captures so well: the parallel thread of Johanne finding her literary voice. The encouragement of her grandmother gives her a context (as well as surfacing some resentment about her own career), but Johanne still must learn to weather the slippage between what she writes and what people see in her writing. There’s also a sense of how the family’s relative privilege comes into play, not just in Johanne’s upbringing (with access to a country cabin), but also through Karin’s point-of-view as a battle-weary feminist activist, who groaned over Kristin’s love of Flashdance as a kid.

Perhaps another facet of the stability granted by this privilege is that Dreams doesn’t lean into Johanne’s formative experience as being a same-sex attraction. Haugerud’s script even questions the notion of framing it that way, part of the film’s affectionate humor: Johanne pushes back when someone classifies her novel as “a story of queer awakening,” in contrast to a vocal fellow student who introduces himself in class as “illegal in 69 countries.” Above all, she is still feeling her way through her sensations, and precisely how she will label or express them seems partly a matter destined for her writing. (The teacher, also named Johanna, proves to be a work-in-progress herself, all too human in her own choices.)

While Dreams might sound like a novelist’s film, it’s quite effectively staged, full of subtle decisions in blocking and how the story moves into or out of scenes (like a lovely forest hike between Karin and Kristin). Among the quotidian settings, Haugerud and DOP Cecilie Semec intersperse striking shots of dance and (oddly enough but effectively) vertiginous stairways. One could imagine so much of the film’s touches getting reworked in a screenwriting lab — curtail that voiceover, build up the best friend, etc. Fortunately Haugerud and Øverbye remain committed to the mystery of desire and the work-in-progress that is life.

Review: Title: Dreams (Sex Love) (Drømmer)
Festival: Berlin (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Dag Johan Haugerud
Cast: Ella Øverbye, Selome Emnetu, Ane Dahl Torp, Anne Marit Jacobsen
Sales agent: m-appeal
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins