Sweet Dreams Review: A Surreal Portrait of Waning Colonial Days in the Dutch East Indies

Malaise is the order of the day in Dutch-Bosnian writer-director Ena Sendijarević’s costume drama Sweet Dreams. Set in the Dutch East Indies at the dawn of the 20th century, the film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor. But for a work that’s all about boredom, Sweet Dreams is far from boring.

It’s the suspicious demise of Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) that sets the plot in motion. Agathe (Renée Soutendijk), the man’s profoundly cynical widow, writes to their son, Cornelis (Florian Myjer), telling him to return from the Netherlands to take over the estate. But when Cornelis and his pregnant wife, Josefien (Lisa Zweerman), arrive, it turns out that Jan has left everything to Karel (Rio Kak Den Haas), the progeny of his unconcealed liaisons with the family’s domestic servant, Siti (Hayati Azis). If Cornelis and Josefien are to sell the plantation as quickly possible and return to Europe, they’ll have to do something about Karel, but Siti is determined to better his situation, one way or another. Meanwhile, unrest is growing as the workers at the sugar factory, represented by Reza (Muhammad Khan), have gone on strike.

“Domination is banal,” Cornelis says at one point, in Dutch, to the Indonesian factory foreman. The irony of such words coming from the mouth of one who directly benefits from domination aside, they encapsulate the core theme of the film. Sweet Dreams, like Lucretia Martel’s Zama, takes aim at a less conspicuous layer of colonization than outright atrocity, dramatizing the futility, the hypocrisy, the stultifying blows to cultural diversity that take place when one people proclaim the right to exploit another’s labor and resources in the name of civilization.

By the time at which Sweet Dreams is set, Dutch colonial control in the Dutch East Indies is decaying. The monotony of the colonizer-colonized relation afflicts both parties, who pantomime roles that have all but shed their meaning. No one expresses this lassitude—coupled with thinly-veiled contempt—more than Siti, when, for instance, Agathe orders her to brew a pot of tea. Yet Siti’s status as mother to Jan’s heir renders her loyalties conflicted, trapping her in the logic of colonialism even as Reza tries to convince her to escape the plantation.

Uttered by Agathe, one of the film’s many aphoristic lines of dialogue (“The more slowly it passes, the more time you have”) practically amounts to a valorization of boredom. Sweet Dreams may not quite adhere to Agathe’s philosophy, but it certainly toys with narrative time, slowing down at the climax, for instance, where most films speed up. In place of rising action, there’s a gradual slide into the surreal from a plateau of unsteady realism as the colonial order unravels, starting with the custom of primogeniture.

Meanwhile, Emo Weemhoff’s cinematography casts the plantation and its jungle environs in an unreal, lurid glow, framing the characters (Cornelis especially) as ludicrous. But it’s Vincent Sinceretti’s sound design that kicks Sweet Dreams up a notch. In scene after scene, the meandering whine of mosquitoes fills the soundtrack, deflating Cornelis and Josefien’s desire to see the colony as some exotic paradise and serving as an insistent reminder of their own parasitic role. When non-diegetic music is present, it’s often a period-inappropriate drum-machined electronica that hampers the viewer from lapsing into uncritical absorption. The comedic exaggeration of certain sound effects, like the resounding click of an empty revolver or the splat of a sausage thrown against the wall, pushes the tone to the borders of slapstick.

If there’s one image that sums up the attitude of Sweet Dreams, it’s a group of Indonesian women washing linens on the riverbank and laughing at the sight of Cornelis, his white suit soaked through after a botched attempt at Karel’s life. Colonialism is treated as an absurd dream we’ve woken up from and can all laugh at now—as opposed to an insidious, shapeshifting power relation that continues to make itself felt in the guises of globalism and neoliberalism.

Arguably, the film’s ending corrects for this with a foretaste of the violence that tends to accompany the death throes of naked colonialism. Taken as a whole, though, it presents Duch rule as idiotic, even grotesquely so, but relatively innocuous. Domination may be banal at times, viewed from certain angles, but it’s still domination. Such subject matter never falls beyond the reach of humor, but it may call for a blacker humor than Sweet Dreams is able to muster.