Sweet Dreams are made of this, who am I to disagree? I’ve travelled the world and the seven seas
Everybody’s looking for something
Like the Marilyn Manson cover of the Eurythmics original, Sweet Dreams is a quizzical yet light-hearted look at an old favourite: power dynamics and racial strata within hierarchies in colonial times (this time the Dutch East Indies in the early 1900s).
Colourful backgrounds hide the malaise (reminding me of The Grand Budapest Hotel) and highlight the differences in the grandiose surroundings of the Dutch housing and clothing compared with the more natural colours and surrounding scenery for locals.
The choice of music in Sweet Dreams is jarring but matches the oddity of the characters on screen.
We open with Jan, the lord of the manor traipsing through the jungle, hunting with his retainers and son. On the return leg, he subjects a weakened retainer to abuse before continuing – the scene only hints at what would happen should he not get up.
Mistreatment extends to Jan’s family members as well as servants – seen later regarding the beneficiaries in his will. We learn that his long-suffering wife Agathe (Renee Soutendijk) shares their palatial home with servants including the ambitious maid, Siti,(Hayati Azis) who resorts to using others as needed. At the same time, her son by Jan, Karel, is spoiled. No one is happy though the servant Reza (Muhammad Khan) is content to share jokes at inopportune times, especially in a crowd.
The head of the household prefers to speak Dutch over native tongues. And the maid’s company over his wife’s. After enjoying himself one night Jan falls into bed and succumbs to a heart attack and is buried. Somewhere.
Agathe sends for her son Cornelis and his pregnant wife Josefine to travel from the Netherlands to help and secure his inheritance which includes a plantation and sugar factory. He hatches a plan to secure their return to Europe while his wife is left to her own devices. Her being slowly chewed by mosquitos is location-accurate and analogous to the owners being bled slowly on the property. The rundown state of property is another symbol of the ending of Dutch rule reinforced by others longing to return home. One dinner guest laments that ’Sooner or later it will all be over for us here’.
Roles are well played particularly the triad of strong female archetypes. Keeping the layer of sweat on every actor’s face is also commendable. The costume pieces would have been tough going in that heat.
Isolation & Exploitation are themes explored: the Dutch are far away from Europe and their families, and Siti fends for herself and her son within the parallel hierarchies established by the colonists and locals. Each character lives with choices they’ve made: there are no innocents here except the unpaid plantation workers plotting revenge. They have accepted their situation and adapted to it. Begitulah is an Indonesian/Malay expression loosely translated as ‘That’s the way it is’ or ‘So it is’.
The isolation is amplified by the Dutch contacting home with the advent of the telephone. Would limited contact with the places you have been to or from make one miss it more than no contact at all? On discussing identity and belonging Siti later states ‘You don’t have to been somewhere to be from there.’
While the ending symbolises a break with the past by burning bridges, will doing so leave them isolated to be exploited later? Sweet Dreams is an unusual film with great acting, cinematography and visuals, and a tense atmosphere that ambles to its conclusion.
7/10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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