Dreams

Susanne (Eva Dahleck) is the owner of a fashion photography studio and her most popular model, Doris (Harriet Anderrson) has just broken up with her fiancé. The two women travel from Stockholm to Gothenburg for a fashion shoot where the desperately pining Susanne contacts her married ex-lover Henrik (Ulf Palme) who no longer wants to continue their affair and Doris meets an aging diplomat (Gunnar Björnstrand) who sees in her a striking resemblance to his wife, now in a mental hospital.

Coming hard on the heels of the relatively light-hearted A Lesson in Love, which was released the previous year, Dreams reverts to the gloominess of 1953’s Sawdust and Tinsel, albeit in a less stark form, and was, like it, a commercial and critical failure. Bergman and Harriet Andersson had ended their relationship and Bergman himself attributed the film’s pessimism to that fact. The sense of life’s tragedy, however, is Bergman’s strong card and the director plots out his thesis with formal elegance, the women’s twin stories, which are told very much as moral lessons, being like reflections of the same image of the weakness of the male sex, thus making their romantic ideas of true love "dreams" in a bitterly ironic sense

 

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