“Sooner or later it will all be over for us here.” Ena Sendijarević’s bittersweet colonial satire Sweet Dreams that opened the Dutch Film Festival on Friday has only just begun, and we already know that we are heading for the end. The end of Dutch colonial rule of the Dutch East Indies. The end often begins a long time before it ends.
Because it is only ‘around 1900’ in the events that Sendijarević paints. No coincidence: that was the moment that the ‘national movement’ got underway in the Dutch East Indies, which through education and cultural emancipation ultimately led to the War of Independence of 1945-1949. In Sweet Dreams we see this woven into the plot as a strike by indigenous workers for better working conditions threatens the sugar plantation where the film is set. Nothing will remain the way it was.
The Dutch colonial past is a seriously underrepresented subject in Dutch film, and Sendijarević makes up for everything in one fell swoop in her inventive, whimsical, ironic film. Earlier this summer, the film was awarded an acting prize for lead actress Renée Soutendijk at the Locarno Film Festival.
Naive paintings
Sendijarević’s almost allegorical view of the decline of patriarch Jan’s house is painted in a flat green that is reminiscent of the naive paintings of Henri ‘Le douanier’ Rousseau.
But her look is anything but naive. Although the film is full of strong plot elements – the strike, Jan’s death, the dragging of his corpse as if we were in a decolonial version of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry ended up – the film is more formalistic than psychological.
With distorted perspectives, a detached narrative structure with six chapters, with all that jungle green and those ridiculous sweaty colonial clothes, the film presents a feverish nightmare reality in which mosquitoes buzz deafeningly. It used to be called Tropenkolder.
To stay or to leave, and how? That, in short, is the central dilemma. Widow Agathe (Soutendijk) was born in the Indies; there is no future for her outside her stale white privilege. Her son Cornelis and his heavily pregnant wife Josefien have no ties with their parents’ second home country and are a refreshing, but also somewhat disturbing presence in this incarnate death house construction. They understand that there is no future for them on the plantation, but they also have no idea how to properly transfer everything. If it were up to them, they would plunder the place for good.
Delightful absurdism
These kinds of nuances show how well Sendijarević, who wrote the screenplay herself, put her film together. You can continuously draw lines to the present. The film does not need to spell out for us how thin the dividing line is between decolonization and neocolonialism. The delightful absurdism, the bizarre dialogues, the casual cruelties, the mythical mysticism of the ‘silent power’, the sexual aspects of colonial behavior fill that in. Sendijarević does not shy away from anything, but treats everything with an empathy that her characters lack.
And unlike the (scarce) previous feature films made in the Netherlands about its own colonial past, she has an eye for the compromised situation of the indigenous residents. Housekeeper Siti and her lover Reza, a rebellious revolutionary, may be the real main characters of this film, and in any case the ones who determine the future, but they are not innocent heroes.
Sendijarević already proved this with her debut film, shot in Bosnia Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019) to be a very talented filmmaker who does not shy away from uncomfortable subjects and has cinematic references and self-mockery. Sweet Dreams is much more dangerous than it seems in all its virtuoso visuality. At the end, a child reaches out to the sky and catches the full moon between his fingers. And a dreamy beautiful image. Then he squeezes her.