Sweet Dreams
Sweet Dreams
The film, “Sweet Dreams” offers a new take on the violent era where the conquering of Africa was reduced to a cruel game. The film has its own this black comical touch and that is what gives “Sweet Dreams” its uniqueness. This makes the film’s plot memorable even though it, unfortunately, does not seem to be the best.
A sugar plantation baron Jan (Hans Dagelet) lives in isolation on a remote Indonesian island in the year 1900. In the beginning, all characters assumed Jan had died, yet his body could not be located. Due to this, who gains ownership of the estate arsenal is somehow not immediately determined.
In some ways, it was like a potential whodunit story waiting to unfold. This is not the focus that Sendijarević feels interested with. The idea of a murder mystery thriller seems to be the last thing that reality will turn out to be. When and how will something occur is all that remains.
When Jan marries an Indonesian woman named Siti (Hayati Azis) and gives birth to Karel (Rio Kaj Den Haas), there’s more to the affair than love. Agathe (Renée Soutendijk) is accompanied by her son Cornelis (Florian Myjer) and daughter in law Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) on a voyage around the world. After the male dies, the female leaves for the muddy desert. It is now time to see how the world evolves.
The events that follow are anger and betrayal which lead to deceit, a situation that arises when it comes to the fact that Jan has chosen Karel over everything. When one loses a loved one, they tend to act in ways that may not be expected of them. There is grief and with it the expectations of money which takes things to the extreme of becoming dangerous and plus becoming insane.
Reza Muhammad Khan, a plantation worker, was one of the leaders of the people and aroused the workers to strike when they were not paid their dues. He evolves into a central figure in a larger story, guarantee everything that accompanies the war with The Man and his women but also seduce Siti to escape with Karel and start life with her as a husband.
In its first third, the movie is, unfortunately, dull and painfully predictable. All the pertinent critiques on the wretched and exasperatingly laughable nature of colonialism are not only shown but practically placed under a massive spotlight for everyone to gobble up.
A corpse-like insect scuttles over the remains of an elegant banquet. Josefien (Lisa Zweerman) gets out of a stuck carriage on a drenched street and the film revels in her getting her posh gumboots all muddy. It is not that what the film’s characters tell us sounds unbelievable, rather that this is all information we probably already possessed yet still are being treated as revolutionary and daring.
The situation becomes even more amusing when Jan finally admits in one of his letters that he fathered a son with his lover and the boy will inherit everything. After which, Sweet Dreams turns into something which is somewhat similar to a movie by the Coen brothers where morons or sociopathically deluded and/or grotesque idiots scheme against each other and get what they deserve because the narrow-minded society that had been ignoring their conspicuous flaws at long last decides to stop being blind and judgment takes place or there are more characters that turn out to be more pathetic and stupid than they imagined.
Emo Weemhoff did the shooting and Lot Rossmark worked on editing “Sweet Dreams” as Iain Sendijarević directed. There is beautiful exploitation in the making of the movie. It’s Just Shot In A Box: 4×3 Academy Ratio is employed in filming, mostly through a wide-angle lens that and people/things appear like cartoons (when the camera moves too fast).
Most pictorial inception pages are symmetrical in composition – not in the style of the Kubricks or the Anderssons, but more like nineties internet fan art. People and objects in every screen shot are placed as if they were pieces of an art display in a vitrine. The movie has people in a zoo. The movie is an anthropological document, focused on its characters with what begins as a rather detached and precise gaze and often gets contemptuous, with some exceptions to the rule.
Until something incredibly sweet and even somewhat surreal comes in and disrupts everything as if glue changes into color.
In the film’s middle and towards the end it is evident that the film is much less interested in slapstick and at times, overwhelms the viewers with visually stunning representations of the element’s- water, fire, wind, and earth in an image or a scenario in the most peculiar way. The ending does not have a conclusion rather a few moments that have been created through a particular kind of beautiful and nonlinear expressionistic cut which is very typical of modern art.
All of this has been solved so beautifully that at times, throughout the movie, it feels as though the directors intentionally positioned themselves as obstacles, believing that there was something so much better throughout the entire project.
However, there is a very long take where a scene is rather amusing and pleasantly excessive as it progresses into David Lynch and Mark Frost’s work when a bar room is being mopped up to the song Green Onion being played by Booker T. and the MGs. Possibly, this is the piece of work where the director is so completely free in her creativity that all the restraints naturally disappear when she takes control of the project.
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- Genre: Comedy, Drama, Sport
- Country: United States
- Director: Lije Sarki
- Cast: Bobby Lee, Kate Upton, Beth Grant
