Zoete dromen
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DIRECTED BY: Ena Sendijarevic
FEATURING: Hayati Azis, Renée Soutendijk, Florian Myjer, Lisa Zweerman, Muhammad Khan, Rio Kaj Den Haas
PLOT: During the twilight of the Dutch empire, Cornelis is summoned to the family’s Indonesian sugar plantation after his father’s death, only to find that his illegitimate half-brother Karel is to inherit everything.
COMMENTS: Indonesia is a beautiful country, despite the Netherlands’ 19th-century imperial ambitions. Ena Sendijarevic’s Sweet Dream allows only occasional glimpses of the glorious landscape, instead trapping the viewer in a decrepit mansion peopled by tottering overseers and embittered local workers. This palatial home, its un-worked plantation, and its silent factory, hold untold secrets—and one very open one. The indigenous maid and the transplanted patriarch have a son, whose existence catalyses the unruly collapse of this microcosm of empire.
Three of Sendijarevic’s stylistic choices anchor her film’s covertly hostile tone. An opening foley creation of buzzes, rustlings, and sizzles promises sweeping jungle. Instead, we find ourselves trapped in 4:3 screen ratio of choking flora. The family home should feel voluminous, but each chamber is trapped by deep shots with tight camera edges. The coloring is delightful but blighted. Each room exhibits what was once a glorious coat of paint—a grand maroon hallway, a hunter green dining room, and a bedroom hued like the yolk of an egg—deteriorating badly from age and stifling humidity. Third, the music. Old, old classics, bubbling up time and again, like a remindful dirge.
Sweet Dreams‘ occasional twitches from traditional period piece make this film, if not outright “weird,” then certainly eccentric. Sitti and Reza are Indonesian natives; the former works as a maid for the Dutch family (and is mother of the natural son), the latter is an erstwhile plantation worker. They share good-natured barbs, have an ebb-and-flow appreciation of the other, and are bilingual. A love scene between the two—classily shot, unlike an early encounter between Sitti and the patriarch—features a gushing synth score and a magically luminescent moon. Another night, Sitti dreams of Reza as a slumbering behemoth beneath vibrant moon, resting herself serenely in the palm of his semi-closed hand.
I found myself so wrapped up in the hazy claustrophobia and painterly images, that the title’s punnery didn’t hit me until well after the film; and, grim punning aside, a darkly humorous streak runs throughout. The mother writes to her son in the Netherlands with good news and bad: his father has died. The bad news is that he must come immediately to the plantation. The Dutch dolts spend much time ordering holes dug around the property, the location of patriarch’s corpse having slipped the mother’s mind. Dutch boy’s wife is afflicted further and further by mosquito bites. Dutch boy himself devolves mentally as he comes to know his half-brother—one for whom Papà crafted a toy by hand.
Sweet Dreams, alongside the soggy decrepitude of the manse and the eye-popping lushness of surrounding jungle, is heavily symbolic, even obviously so—though is no worse for its sleeve-worn metaphors. Like the family, the colonizers’ time is coming to an end, with strange fate and ill machinations auguring a discouraging future. But decay will be supplanted by the younger generation, the new generation, rising from the flames of the by-going era.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
