Plot in a nutshell
In a small Bulgarian border town, archaeologist Veska (Yana Radeva) reconnects with a friend from her past and is drawn into the murky criminal world he can’t seem to shake off. What begins as an innocent gesture to help leads to an excavation of the town’s buried secrets, and of Veska’s own mysterious past.
No matter how raw, genuine and human a movie’s themes are, something else is necessary for attention and curiosity to be sustained; a compelling visual language. At the risk of sounding too academic, if a film fails to find some kind of beauty in the ugliness of the world its depicting, momentum starts to drag and the audience starts to mentally check out, regardless of how strong the story’s core is. That’s exactly the affliction plaguing Valeska Grisebach’s The Dreamed Adventure.
Only a few masters have figured out the difficult trick of finding beauty in ugliness (Tsai Ming-liang, Andrei Tarkovsky, Emir Kusturica come to mind), and it’s a trick that would’ve served Grisebach well here, but that’s not to say that there’s absolutely no beauty in The Dreamed Adventure. Far from it.
The film is carried by the conversations the characters have, filled with poignant remembrances of a life once lived and weighed down by the heavy burdens left behind for the younger generation to carry. The dialogue is so simple and so real that it doesn’t feel scripted, and because of that it manages to scratch at something essential and distinctly human; the pangs of regret, fatigue and nostalgia of lived experience.
There’s beauty in the performances too, a full ensemble of interesting, weary faces that have lived through all sorts of pain. Radeva leads this troupe with great composure, her wonderful smile is the brightest light in a dimmed-out world, and Syuleyman Alilov Letifov has the kind of OG bandit ruggedness that gives credence to the western label some have attached to this movie.
Fascinating faces, confident performances, powerfully simple dialogue and some apt archeological symbolism aside, The Dreamed Adventure suffers the fate of being a drag. Grisebach fails to find the visual beauty in the film’s desolate environment and decrepit mise en scène. Ultimately, this oppressively drab aesthetic buries an otherwise good story a bit too deep.