Hot for Teacher

Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Dreams” — the third chapter in his loose Oslo trilogy, following “Sex” and “Love” — is a tender teenage saga about a lovelorn high schooler who falls for her female teacher. Like its predecessors, it seeks the holy in the mundane, and uses the Norway capital’s architecture as a mirror for its characters’ introspections. However, unlike the previous entries, it’s a voice-over heavy piece that wields narration to probe the troubled expressions of remarkable teen actress Ella Øverbye. The result is a coming-of-age story that feels like something genuinely new in nouveau queer cinema.

The movie follows 16-year-old Johanne (Øverbye), a ballet dancer who has recently quit the hobby over its gender rigidity. On the first day of school, she becomes smitten with her French literature instructor Johanna (Selome Emnetu), a well-traveled woman of unspecified ethnicity (the actress playing her is Eritrean). The young, lovestruck Johanne grows more distracted by the day, until she concocts excuses to show up at the teacher’s high-rise apartment. Before we’re shown what transpires behind closed doors — it’s more innocent than initially suggested, but far more emotionally complicated — Haugerud reveals that at least some of Johanne’s narrations are excerpts from a memoir penned a year after the depicted rendezvous.

The only people she trusts with her writing are her poet grandmother Karin (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and her publisher mother Kristin (Ane Dahl Torp), who debate the nature and meaning of Johanne’s confession while critiquing her prose. They suspect the manuscript is worthy of being published, though they worry that it might be a veiled account of emotional abuse. They’re both single and romantically unfulfilled, and their work seldom loves them back, scenarios of rejection that Johanne recognizes all too well, once she matures enough to do so.

The debate between Karin and Kristin over what to do with the memoir is the film’s window to the past, through which we’re shown the events as they transpired from Johanne’s ecstatic point of view. Although they were never physically intimate, the time the schoolteacher Johanna spent teaching Johanne to knit after hours left an indelible mark on the suggestible teen, who writes of adolescent, sensual yearning. Whenever we see them together, Johanne’s naïve recollections are masked by a warm, rose-tinted glow, a flourish Haugerud and cinematographer Cecilie Semec reserve for the crescendos of prior entries. In “Dreams,” ethereal shimmers represent teenage nostalgia for the small comforts of unconsummated intimacy.

The voice-over device allows Haugerud to dramatize the way all-encompassing teenage love colors Johanne’s every waking moment; her conversations with her teenage peers say one thing, but her imagination is consumed by the fantasy of being desired. She seeks solace and closure in writing about her crush, which she believes, deep down, was reciprocated. Her recollections are peppered with astute observations about Oslo and its architecture, making the film a worthy thematic successor to “Sex” and “Love,” both of which were built on metaphors about municipal architecture. En route to her teacher’s apartment one evening, traipsing through an immigrant neighborhood, scored by composer Anna Berg’s upbeat percussions, the spring in Johanne’s step is accompanied by her reflections on class and religion, including her envy of her teacher’s pious, more traditional background. As the young writer looks up at the skyscrapers surrounding Johanna’s building, a flashing Deloitte logo towers over her, a symbol of the capitalism that has enervated communal bonds and replaced beautiful buildings — a subtle undercurrent throughout the trilogy.

The story’s emotional grays, especially in the final act, bring the teacher’s questionable behavior into focus without being preachy or didactic. Instead, Haugerud unspools his drama through convincing approximations of teenage girlhood in all its silent self-loathing and eruptive desire (and across a story that, notably, features no significant male presence). The camera never leers at the movie’s queer female characters, but studies the visual and emotional details of the teenage sapphic gaze: how sweaters shape the body, the way thrilling romantic highs give way to steep crashes. For Johanne, this brief moment in time is “the most beautiful thing [she’ll] ever experience.” While adult viewers might know better intellectually, her emotional truths are rendered in such vivid, pulsing hues that it’s hard to disagree with her.