First love is by definition all-consuming, reshaping one’s world with overwhelming intensity. In Dreams (Sex Love), a multi-generational reflection on first love from Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, captures this transformative experience, The movie tells the story of Johanne, a high school student who falls deeply for her French teacher. While the premise may seem familiar, the film’s execution is anything but. With remarkable authenticity, Dreams conveys the raw, feverish energy of youthful desire—both in mind and body—while weaving in a broader meditation on love across different stages of life...
Johanne’s infatuation unfolds through writing, a medium that serves both as her escape and her obsession. Her diary becomes the space where she dissects every volatile shift in emotion, balancing unbearable longing with the fear of exposure. Through evocative voice-over narration, we witness a story that reads like a novel in the making—so vividly crafted that one almost mourns the fact that it does not truly exist. Much like Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Destiny in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Dreams plays with the idea of a story within a story, elevating Johanne from subject to narrator, from dreamer to writer.
As her relationship with writing deepens, so does her self-awareness. Haugerud subtly explores the tension between storytelling and reality, positioning Johanne as someone who, even unknowingly, already wields the power of an author. The lines between what happened and what was imagined blur—especially as her encounters with the teacher drift between memory and fantasy. Yet, in contrast to her fevered words, the teacher remains distant, retreating with the quiet cruelty of an adult who knows how to shrink something vast into something small and forgettable.
What makes Dreams truly extraordinary is how Haugerud refracts Johanne’s experience through a multigenerational lens. When her grandmother—herself a writer—reads Johanne’s diary, she shares it with Johanne’s mother, triggering a series of reactions that expand the film’s emotional scope. Suddenly, Dreams is no longer just about first love but about love at every age—about longing, regret, and the silent ache of wanting to be seen.
The relationship between Johanne, her mother, and her grandmother is tinged with admiration, jealousy, and unspoken truths. When her mother reads the diary, she reacts not with shock, but with a quiet tenderness, acknowledging Johanne’s queer awakening before Johanne herself has fully processed it. These shifting perspectives on love—its presence, its absence, and its lingering echoes—add layers of emotional depth to the film.
As Dreams reaches its final act, Haugerud allows a moment of pure lyricism: Johanne’s grandmother, alone, dances on an impossibly long staircase. It is a scene of staggering emotional power, capturing the universal desire to be noticed, to be wanted. This moment, juxtaposed against Johanne’s own journey, reinforces how love—whether new or long past—continues to shape us.
By the end, Johanne is no longer the fevered girl who once poured her emotions onto the page. Her novel remains, frozen in time, even as her memory of that love begins to soften. Dreams understands that first love is both ephemeral and eternal, an experience that fades but never fully disappears. In distilling this searing clarity into a profoundly moving, beautifully crafted film, Haugerud delivers not just a story of infatuation, but a meditation on love in all its forms.
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