Critic Reviews

Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic.

Everything is in flux in The Dreamed Adventure, even the genre of a film that shape-shifts between noir, western and romance. At its heart is the director’s extraordinary deployment of a cast of non-professionals who seem to carry their own stories with them in every line and gesture.

The film is undeniably demanding: slow, resistant, and often withholding. It rarely offers explanation or narrative relief, leaving connections implied but never stated. But this difficulty is structural. It is built around dynamics rather than events, around how people adjust to one another in real time and negotiate power through proximity alone.

Like many films at the festival this year The Dreamed Adventure is too long, but a running time of almost three hours does let you get under the skin of Veska, played with grit, soul and wit by Yana Radeva.

This is a film of details and detours, digressive above all, cast with non-professionals native to the region. It plays as an ethnographic travelogue, using a potboiler hook for lightly applied narrative structure.

Grisebach’s understated approach to character works evocatively at the start when it is a question of blending them into this very specific place (filmed with consistent majesty by cinematographer Bernhard Keller) and teeing up the mystery of the past. However it falters when it comes to paying off that mystery and exorcising the ghosts that Veska is reckoning with.

This is a Valeska Grisebach movie, so even if the stakes initially seem high, the director does everything she can not to deliver a predictable action-packed suspenser, but rather an intermittently fascinating and frustrating portrait of a place that’s been left to the dogs.

The Dreamed Adventure is, ultimately, not an easy or altogether conformable viewing experience. But Grisebach’s penchant for unfussy storytelling lulls us into such complacency with Veska that even the subtlest hints suggest the hard won comfort of the present is on the verge of crumbling at any minute. Perhaps the dreamed adventure is, rather troublingly, our ability to believe in stability or comfort because powers beyond our control can pull us into depths we pretend aren’t there.

The Dreamed Adventure is clearly the work of a director with a fluent, distinctive film-making language, but what she is trying to tell us is elusive.