Dreams (1955) - film review

Susanne Frank is a fashion photographer with a successful agency in Stockholm.  Doris is her favourite model, a sensitive and naïve young woman.  Having ended her relationship with her boyfriend, Palle, Doris agrees to accompany Susanne on a trip to the town of Gothenburg, ostensibly for a photo shoot.  Susanne’s ulterior motive for the trip is to try to rekindle an affair with her former lover, Henrik, who is now settled with a wife and family. Whilst drifting around Gothenburg, Doris encounters a kindly middle-aged man, Consul Otto Sönderby, who offers her expensive gifts and persuades her to spend the afternoon with him.  Later, Susanne is reunited with her lover, but the liaison proves to be brief….

Dreams, a comparatively minor work in the filmography of Ingmar Bergman – possibly the greatest film maker in history – is one of a series of light romantic dramas the Swedish director made in his early period, the late 1940s / early 1950s.  The film features Harriet Andersson, Bergman’s former lover and the star of his earlier film, Monika (1953).  Less stylised and challenging than the director’s subsequent films, Dreams resembles a conventional mix of melodrama and romantic comedy of this era.  It is certainly a very different kind of film – much lighter in tone, much less cynical, far less philosophical – than Bergman’s subsequent films.  What makes the film instantly identifiable as Bergman is the alluring chiaroscuro cinematography (particularly his skilful use of the close-up) which makes dialogue superfluous and conveys, far more profoundly than words, the feelings and motivating impulses of his protagonists.  It’s a sign of Bergman’s humanity and extraordinary artistic talent that such an anodyne tale of transient love is told with such sensitivity, elegance and soulful poetry, a suggestion of the cinematic treasures that were later to pour from this fountain of creative genius.

© James Travers 2007

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