Sweet Dreams
In a salacious and audacious manner, the second half of the film transforms into a crude and almost vulgar parody centering on an absurd and comedic take on colonialism in the film ‘Sweet Dreams’.
This film, written and directed by Ena Sendijarevic, takes place in 1900 on a tiny and lonely island of the Indonesian archipelago, where Baron Jan (Hans Dagelet) Is Said to be Dead. By apparently, the filmmakers guess that most of his living characters presume him dead, however none have seen his dead body. Now it complicates the inevitable struggle that is bound to take place, of who will own the plantation and what will happen to it. The way the setup has been created had all the makings of a classic murder mystery, however Ena Sendijarevic is not in the business of creating stories that are fascinating for their narrative arcs. Practically every plot twist there is in the movie is provided to you on a silver platter or hinted to you in some mundane manner. What is left is the presentation of the events and the personality traits of the members of the cast.
What emerges as critical is that Jan has a son Karel (Rio Kaj Den Haas) with Siti (Hayati Azis) an Indonesian woman who was a worker on the plantation in which he was involved. After the demise of the Old Man, his son Cornelis (Florian Myjer) and his daughter in law Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) pregnant women, leave Netherlands to go around the globe where the new widow Agathe (Renée Soutendijk) is and has no idea as to what next step will be.
From here, things turn unpleasant as Jan’s announcement that he plans on leaving everything to Karel brings about spite and resentment. As they say, ‘there’s no grief as outrageous as loss and loss with expectation can be a volatile cocktail’. A plantation worker named Reza Misaji Khan, who organizes his coworkers and incites them to stop working due to unpaid salaries, becomes a noteworthy figure throughout the story. He is key in the revolution, saying that he will not only wage war against the Man and his women but that he will also take Siti away from Karel and convince her to become his wife instead.
The film, unfortunately, is painfully predictable in its first thirty minutes. Any such elementary commentary on any of the absurdities and atrocities of colonialism is not just mentioned, it is almost handed over to the audience on a platter and illuminated in bright lights. The aftermath of a lavish family gathering includes a live cockroach. Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) steps out of a carriage that has become bogged down in a dirt track, and the camera lingers on her expensive looking covered in mud soles. It is not that there is something inside this film discourse that is untrue, it is just that these are things which we were most likely aware of yet are still called revolutionary and intended to shock.
The ordeals become fascinating at the point when Jan posthumously has to confess in writing that he has a son who is illegitimate and that the child is the sole heir. Thereafter “Sweet Dreams” is transformed into something rather reminiscent of a Cohen brothers film where irrational, deluded and repulsive clients conspire against one another and meet their end not because they are arrogant observers who ignore their blindingly obvious faults but because their self-styled ruthless and clever personas prove to be meek and simple.
Shot by Emo Weemhoff, edited by Lot Rossmark and directed by Sendijarević, sweet dreams is so strung together. Almost the whole movie, filmed with wide-angle lenses that cartoonishly distort people and objects, is quick panning that shifts the angle to the squarish, 4×3 ‘Academy’ ratio. Every single one establishing shot(view scene) goes through the symmetric framed shot of the camera, simply to illustrate each detail of the shot which has been grouped together rather than in a manner of Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson but most likely erotic fan art of his. The visual experience itself is appalling since every single frame has a head and each person occupies a space within the frame that is quite similar to how some objects are coordinated in a framed exhibition. The cinema is one giant zoo filled with humans. It can and it does observe its characters with steely impenetrable sarcasm at times very scientifically but only upto a point.
And then it all finally gives way. Something more overtly lyrical and then, gently and almost voyeuristically the film springs forth, so subtly that one hardly notices.
It appears that the film is no longer focused on comedy or satire, rather it makes various digressions in order to surprise or create an impact with breathtaking, strange, or sometimes hauntingly beautiful imagery (usually involving one or more of the elements) Water, Fire, Wind, Earth. The plot does not so much conclude as it just comes to a halt, but not before showering a few vignettes and moments that are constructed and put together, in one instance cut and intercut, with a reasoning that remains unclear, but it does seem to have a character of quite a number of intense scenes in contemporary art leave alone expressionism.
Some of the flights of fancy in the last twenty minutes are so lovely that they serve the flag as though the previous sections were such an excessive prelude to what is central and what is remarkable about the work being presented. There is a very long take somewhere at the end that is shocking and overly astonishing in its effectiveness as that in David Lynch and Mark Frost’s ‘Twin Peaks. The Return’ where a man wipes the floor of a bar to the full version of Green Onion by Booker T and the MGs There is a possibility that this is a filmmaker who grows more interesting and original the more she tries to resist the world.
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