07/08/2023 - Ena Sendijarević follows up her award-winning debut with an uncanny period tale set in the Dutch East Indies

After the great success of her debut feature, Take Me Somewhere Nice [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ena Sendijarević
film profile], director Ena Sendijarević shifts her gaze from her Bosnian roots to the colonial past of the country where she grew up and lives, the Netherlands. Sweet Dreams [+see also:
trailer
interview: Ena Sendijarević
film profile] premiered as part of Locarno Film Festival’s International Competition and is both delightful and snappy in the ways it tackles complex geopolitical issues, embodied by its characters and their oppositional attitudes towards power. At one point, towards the film’s end, a mirror cracks in the colonisers’ lavish mansion — a detail that is ripe with symbolism for a doomed order, for a flawed way of looking at things, and more importantly, for a faulty reflection.

Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan may be enjoying what many would call a happy life, with a wife (Agathe, played by Renée Soutendijk), a housemaid-concubine (Siti, played by Hayati Azis), a sugar factory to bring in the season’s harvest, and an opulent house and milieu. But alas: Agathe is impatient, Siti is trying to provide for the illegitimate son she has with Jan, and the factory workers are on strike. One night, all of a sudden, Jan has a heart attack and his death throws their neatly ordered world into dismay. The now matriarch is desperate to maintain her status, as well as the privileges she’s grown up with (“ladies should rest”), so she calls for her son. Cornelius (Florian Myjer) and his heavily pregnant wife Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), accustomed to a comfortable life in the Netherlands, now have to navigate complex dynamics as both outsiders and colonisers. 

Together with the cinematographer Emo Weemhoff, Sendijarević crafts a world that is so obviously a fabrication — from the distorted wide-lens shots, the occasional high angles and slow zooms, the intensity of the colour green against the white colonial attire — that its visual delight only emphasises the ambient aggression and ill intent. Her vision is singular, in the direct way it works with artificiality to uncover a raw truth about the human factors in the colonial paradigm. In setting the film on an unspecified island and “around the year 1900,” the writer-director carves out her freedom to actually go deep into interpersonal dynamics and portray them as equal parts vile and absurd.

Sweet Dreams refers to the last remnant of a life marked by a continuous process of subjugation. Sendijarević bridges past and present by fleshing out cruel, silenced histories through satire and formalism. Speaking to viewers today in a cinematic language they’re more used to, she may as well be saying that they’re also living through the beginning of the end. But if colonialism lives on through its reverberations in the way our world is structured, can we live through the Anthropocene?

Sweet Dreams is a co-production between Lemming Film and VPRO in the Netherlands, Plattform Produktion and Film ï Vast in Sweden, and Indonesia’s Tala Media. Heretic handles international sales.