Movie-festival juries are persistently inconsistent, and infrequently arbitrarily assembled. Annually, a number of largely unacquainted, disparate-minded luminaries from throughout the movie world—administrators, screenwriters, actors, and, once in a while, critics—are introduced collectively to fabricate the phantasm of consensus. Even so, sure organizing ideas can assist nudge that consensus alongside. At an occasion such because the Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition, higher generally known as the Berlinale, the primary competitors usually contains well-established auteurs and up-and-coming abilities alike—an association that, on the danger of generalizing, I’d say typically favors the newcomers. Familiarity with a veteran filmmaker doesn’t breed contempt, however it might put a damper on pleasure or immediate unflattering comparisons with earlier efforts. A lesser-known artist arrives with no such baggage, and the fun of creating a daring discovery could be accordingly arduous to withstand.
The Norwegian author and director Dag Johan Haugerud, who was awarded the Golden Bear, the highest prize, at this yr’s Berlinale, definitely counts as a discovery—although, at sixty, and with a number of shorts and options to his identify, he’s hardly a newcomer. He received over this yr’s Worldwide Jury, led by the director Todd Haynes, with “Goals (Intercourse Love),” a lyrical, transferring, gently provocative comedy concerning the pleasures and the perils of a teen-age infatuation. The film, whose authentic Norwegian title is “Drømmer,” is the third entry in a loosely interconnected trilogy; the primary two installments, “Intercourse” and “Love,” screened on the 2024 Berlin and Venice movie festivals, respectively. I haven’t seen both of these two movies, and I don’t know if any of the jurors did, however I think it wouldn’t matter. Although “Goals (Intercourse Love)” left me impatient to meet up with the remainder of the trilogy, it sweeps you up, assuredly and certainly dreamily, all by itself.
A lot of the story is narrated by Johanne (Ella Øverbye), a quietly perceptive seventeen-year-old who develops an intoxicating crush on her French instructor, the equally named Johanna (Selome Emnetu). In voice-over, she lingers on and amplifies all method of putting particulars: Johanna’s worldly bearing and otherworldly magnificence; the insufferable stirrings of jealousy aroused when her instructor bonds with different college students; the deeper bond that varieties when Johanne impulsively pays a go to to Johanna’s condominium. Such inside monologue is usually dismissed as an inherently uncinematic gadget—an assumption to which “Goals (Intercourse Love)” supplies an absorbing corrective. Haugerud, who’s additionally a novelist, has an beautiful ear for dialogue, and Johanne’s phrases, crucially, by no means appear to be doing, or duplicating, the work of the pictures. The movie’s exact juxtapositions of sight and sound produce good flashes of perception, cascading specifics of texture and emotional coloration, and a cumulatively seductive, virtually musical stream.
The narration can also be key to a playful but rigorous literary conceit. Earlier than lengthy, we be taught that we’ve been listening, partly, to excerpts from a manuscript that Johanne has written about her relationship with Johanna—a challenge that she seems to have undertaken within the spirit of an exorcism. Did Johanne’s love stay unrequited; if not, how far did it go, and what authorized or moral boundaries, if any, have been crossed? Precisely how a lot of the manuscript must be believed within the first place? We’re not the one ones pondering these questions; within the movie’s most impressed stroke, Johanne exhibits the manuscript to her grandmother (Anne Marit Jacobsen) and her mom (Ane Dahl Torp), in that order. Their reactions present a exceptional complexity of vary: shock and concern, after all, but additionally fascination, confusion, and justified admiration of Johanne’s writerly items.
When the chance emerges that the manuscript is perhaps revealed, the characters’ responses, together with an amusingly abrupt about-face on the mom’s half, develop right into a wry and shocking commentary on the age-old follow—generally honest, generally mercenary, and generally each—of mining one’s expertise for artwork. It’s typical of the characters’ forward-looking knowledge, and Haugerud’s as nicely, that, though they take into account the differentials of age and energy at play, Johanne’s attraction to a different lady, in and of itself, shouldn’t be handled as one thing particularly exceptional or as a hard and fast level of identification. At coronary heart, “Goals (Intercourse Love)” understands that want, in no matter kind it manifests, seldom conforms to wash, anticipated boundaries. In inserting three generations of girls in such heat and revelatory dialog, it collapses quite a lot of boundaries of its personal.
