Looking back on early 20th century Dutch colonial history through a post-millennial lens of surreal comedy and playful artifice, Sweet Dreams is as delicious as its heavily ironic title implies, though the prevailing sardonic tone is more nightmarish than dreamlike. Amsterdam-based writer-director Ena Sendijarevic earned warm reviews for her debut feature Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019), which drew on her childhood as a Bosnian war refugee growing up in the Netherlands. Her second feature is more impressive and ambitious, earning multiple festival prizes before being submitted as the official Dutch entry to the 2024 Academy Awards. Full of visual riches and deadpan humour, this darkly absurd farce makes its Maltese big-screen debut this week, playing in competition at the Meditterane Film Festival in Valletta.
Sweet Dreams takes place on a sugar plantation in an unnamed corner of Indonesia somewhere around the year 1900, just as the Dutch colonial powers are beginning to lose their grip over a restless indigenous population. Pompous, arrogant, extravagant whiskered plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagalet) lives a grand life, flanked by his long-suffering wife Agathe (veteran Dutch screen icon Renée Soutendijk) and his local concubine Siti (Hayati Azis), who serves as housemaid and mother to Jan’s illegitimate young son Karel (Rio Den Haas). But Jan’s sudden death brings a torrent of latent tensions bubbling to the surface. There is trouble in paradise.
The sugar factory workers are on strike, led by revolutionary hothead Reza (Muhammad Khan), who has his own romantic designs on the proud Siti, imploring her to flee the plantation with him. Anxious about losing her life of idle privilege, Agathe summons her grown-up son Cornelius (Florian Myjer) and his heavily pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) to Indonesia to help run the family business.
A comically effete North European lily wilting in the sultry tropical heat, Cornelius only dreams of selling the sugar factory and returning to the Netherlands as soon as possible. The hormonally deranged Josefien, meanwhile, is desperate for sexual satisfaction, whether from a bedpost or an obliging local man. In a gleefully anarchic twist, it soon emerges that Jan’s will leaves the entire sugar business to his bastard son Karel, a bitter shock that leads the desperate Dutch overlords mulling homicidal schemes and shady Faustian deals.
Filmed on the former French island colony of Reunion after a planned Indonesian shoot fell through at late notice due to Covid restrictions, Sweet Dreams has a heavy stylised look that makes a virtue of its own stagey mannerisms. Sendijarevic and her regular cinematographer Emo Weemhoff drew on the childlike jungle vistas of French post-impressionist Henri Rousseau for inspiration, exoticised orientalist visions painted by a man who never left France. There are echoes of the classic Dutch Masters in the film’s interior scenes too, with their precisely framed geometry, dark wooded panels and chequered floor tiles. Weemhoff also uses smashed mirrors, candlelight and smoke to striking visual effect. Shot in the boxy Academy ratio, these meticulously composed tableaux are consistently pleasing to the eye.
Sweet Dreams lays on its anti-colonial message pretty thickly, purposely favouring heightened caricature over psychological complexity. The Dutch protagonists are all either grotesque villains or self-aggrandising idiots, the Indonesians mostly depicted as noble victims, although at least Siti and Reza are permitted more ambivalent moral and emotional shading.
Likewise, some of the plot twists only make sense on a symbolic level rather than as plausible human drama. A final explosive bonfire of the vanities feels particularly improbable, with too many characters calmly embracing their own destruction for narrative convenience. That said, Sendijarevic has pushed the film’s self-consciously theatrical style from the start, so she has earned the right to shun naturalism for a more archly ironic register, which is lightly sprinkled with surrealism and magical realism. Martial Foe’s generously deployed score, a kind of jarringly discordant fairground music, adds to the sense of European colonial fantasies slowly collapsing into tragicomic farce.
Director, screenwriter: Ena Sendijarevic
Cast: Renée Soutendijk, Hayati Azis, Lisa Zweerman, Florian Myjer, Muhammad Khan, Hans Dagalet, Rio Den Haas
Producers: Erik Glijinis, Leontine Petit
Cinematography: Emo Weemhoff
Production designer: Myrte Beltman
Costume designer: Bernadette Corstens
Editing: Lot Rossmark
Music: Martial Foe
Production company: Lemming Film (Netherlands), VPRO (Netherlands), Plattform Produktion (Sweden), Film ï Vast Sweden (Sweden), Tala Media (Indonesia)
World sales: Heretic
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (Competition)
In Dutch, Indonesian
98 minutes
