Jun 20, 2025
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Norwegian Film Saves Sex and Love
by Doniphan Blair
'Love (Sex Dreams)' hits escape velocity when teenage Johanne arrives at the home of her French teacher crush—the next line is 'Or my entire life would end.' photo: Dag Johan HaugerudPLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
EVEN THOUGH CINESOURCE WAS
rejected for a festival pass at the Sonoma Film Festival this year, which we received annually since 2010, writer Randy Gordon and I decided—what the hell—let’s go anyway (read about our other cineSOURCE adventures, including in Sonoma here).
And, guess what—we had a TERRIFIC time!—as usual. I even got a nice, old-fashioned Airbnb three blocks from the square, and we saw some great films and ate some fabulous food, which is the added bonus of the Sonoma or Napa festivals. Although I can only mention one film, due to budget constraints, it was so good, it will make up for not reviewing three, as is our standard.
“Dreams (Sex Love)”—the title includes the parenthetical for reasons I will explain below—hails from Norway, and is insanely good, in that master-of-the-cinema-arts manner Nordics exude, especially in their now famous noirs. In fact, this film reverses the noir aesthetic. Not only is “Dreams (Sex Love)” sunny, romantic, childlike and vulnerable (see trailer here), it turns the gender, race and feminist complexities of our day on their head, not to mention it has fabulous film crafting. Indeed, “Dreams (Sex Love)" is presents as workman-like, which allows it to periodically take your breath away by blossoming into effervescent beauty.
The set up is simple enough: a drab-looking, totally-typical Norwegian (blond but barely attractive) teenage girl, Johanne (excellently inhabited by Ella Overbye), falls in infatuated, horn-dog sexual attraction as well as mad love with her beautiful, organic, arty AND, last but not least, brown French teacher (Selome Emnetu), until the multicultural onion starts peeling.
First Johanne writes about the affair, which turns into almost 100 typed pages, which she gives to her feminist single mother (Ane Dahl Torp), who is outraged she didn’t know about her only child’s first sex already. They are an open, honest, ultraliberal and share-everything family, after all.
Johanne finally explains all to her miffed mother. photo: Dag Johan HaugerudBy the way, this all unfolds in an innocuous we-live-at-IKEA-but-wild-things-are-happening-in-the-all-gender-bathroom kind of way, so you’re not distracted by braggadocio flourishes but still periodically amazed by the precision and symbolism of the film's cinema arts.
It all seems fine and good—our hero has survived her first brush with that blood thirsty demon: romantic sexual love—until her mother shares the story— despite explicitly promising not to—with Johanne’s grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen), who happens to be even more of a feminist and also an artist.
Indeed, Grandma is a published poet and probably prominent, although the filmmakers don’t make a big thing of it—that supposed Nordic modesty, which is actually their way of virtue signaling. As you may have already guessed, mom and grandma eventually mollify their anger and Johanne accepts their apology. (In case you didn’t know: mothers ALWAYS read their daughter’s diaries, even after they swear not to, and the ones who claim they didn't are lying.) Moreover, Grandma decides it's good enough to submit to her editor.
Although there’s no girl-on-girl nudity—unfortunately, since sex is a part of life, cinema does it so much better than novels, and Nordics are supposedly nude-positive, due to their tradition of co-ed saunas—and Johanne only has sex with her teacher nine times (if I recall correctly), the story keeps climbing up, expanding out, engorging, as it were. As it broaches new ideas and feelings, both for the characters and for us, we are soon reeling from the many but fully motivated narrative reverses.
You know the way some films have three or four endings, and you wish the filmmaker had just stopped upping the ante, and stood pat at the simple and solid first or perhaps second, which would have made the film sharper and more succinct, “Love” has three ending—but, in its case, each one is better than the last.
Dag Johan Haugerud, the 60-something ex-librarian who is reinventing romance as well as sex and love for the post-woke era. photo: Dag Johan HaugerudThe biggest shocker comes with the credits, when we learn “Dreams (Sex Love)” was not written by a teenage girl or even an avant-garde feminist author but a nerdy looking, middle aged man, Dag Johan Haugerud. Ironically, he came up as a librarian before becoming a novelist and then rocking Scandinavia with a number of films, starting with "I Belong" (2012) which won the Nordic Film Prize (a whopping $7,000 US).
Indeed, “Dreams (Sex Love)” is called that because it is the third part of the trilogy, along with ”Sex” and "Love"—all three were completed and began winning awards all over Europe in 2024. I desperately want to see the other two, but they are not available on standard streaming services.
Soon to be at an art house near you, I recommend getting off the couch because hot sex couched in smoking hot culture is the only way we'll solve the romantic crisis currently rendering us unloved and unlovable as well as killing us (literally, our population decline) today.
Posted on May 04, 2025 - 11:55 AM
by Doniphan Blair
'Love (Sex Dreams)' hits escape velocity when teenage Johanne arrives at the home of her French teacher crush—the next line is 'Or my entire life would end.' photo: Dag Johan HaugerudEVEN THOUGH CINESOURCE WAS
rejected for a festival pass at the Sonoma Film Festival this year, which we received annually since 2010, writer Randy Gordon and I decided—what the hell—let’s go anyway (read about our other cineSOURCE adventures, including in Sonoma here).
And, guess what—we had a TERRIFIC time!—as usual. I even got a nice, old-fashioned Airbnb three blocks from the square, and we saw some great films and ate some fabulous food, which is the added bonus of the Sonoma or Napa festivals. Although I can only mention one film, due to budget constraints, it was so good, it will make up for not reviewing three, as is our standard.
“Dreams (Sex Love)”—the title includes the parenthetical for reasons I will explain below—hails from Norway, and is insanely good, in that master-of-the-cinema-arts manner Nordics exude, especially in their now famous noirs. In fact, this film reverses the noir aesthetic. Not only is “Dreams (Sex Love)” sunny, romantic, childlike and vulnerable (see trailer here), it turns the gender, race and feminist complexities of our day on their head, not to mention it has fabulous film crafting. Indeed, “Dreams (Sex Love)" is presents as workman-like, which allows it to periodically take your breath away by blossoming into effervescent beauty.
The set up is simple enough: a drab-looking, totally-typical Norwegian (blond but barely attractive) teenage girl, Johanne (excellently inhabited by Ella Overbye), falls in infatuated, horn-dog sexual attraction as well as mad love with her beautiful, organic, arty AND, last but not least, brown French teacher (Selome Emnetu), until the multicultural onion starts peeling.
First Johanne writes about the affair, which turns into almost 100 typed pages, which she gives to her feminist single mother (Ane Dahl Torp), who is outraged she didn’t know about her only child’s first sex already. They are an open, honest, ultraliberal and share-everything family, after all.
Johanne finally explains all to her miffed mother. photo: Dag Johan HaugerudIt all seems fine and good—our hero has survived her first brush with that blood thirsty demon: romantic sexual love—until her mother shares the story— despite explicitly promising not to—with Johanne’s grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen), who happens to be even more of a feminist and also an artist.
Indeed, Grandma is a published poet and probably prominent, although the filmmakers don’t make a big thing of it—that supposed Nordic modesty, which is actually their way of virtue signaling. As you may have already guessed, mom and grandma eventually mollify their anger and Johanne accepts their apology. (In case you didn’t know: mothers ALWAYS read their daughter’s diaries, even after they swear not to, and the ones who claim they didn't are lying.) Moreover, Grandma decides it's good enough to submit to her editor.
Although there’s no girl-on-girl nudity—unfortunately, since sex is a part of life, cinema does it so much better than novels, and Nordics are supposedly nude-positive, due to their tradition of co-ed saunas—and Johanne only has sex with her teacher nine times (if I recall correctly), the story keeps climbing up, expanding out, engorging, as it were. As it broaches new ideas and feelings, both for the characters and for us, we are soon reeling from the many but fully motivated narrative reverses.
You know the way some films have three or four endings, and you wish the filmmaker had just stopped upping the ante, and stood pat at the simple and solid first or perhaps second, which would have made the film sharper and more succinct, “Love” has three ending—but, in its case, each one is better than the last.
Dag Johan Haugerud, the 60-something ex-librarian who is reinventing romance as well as sex and love for the post-woke era. photo: Dag Johan HaugerudIndeed, “Dreams (Sex Love)” is called that because it is the third part of the trilogy, along with ”Sex” and "Love"—all three were completed and began winning awards all over Europe in 2024. I desperately want to see the other two, but they are not available on standard streaming services.
Soon to be at an art house near you, I recommend getting off the couch because hot sex couched in smoking hot culture is the only way we'll solve the romantic crisis currently rendering us unloved and unlovable as well as killing us (literally, our population decline) today.
Posted on May 04, 2025 - 11:55 AM
