The Cannes prize-winning third film from Valeska Grisebach finds the writer-director returning to the big sky borderlands where Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece meet. Sharing not only its location but also the working-class milieu of her breakout film Western (2017), Grisebach’s new work is something deeper and stranger. Littered with lonesome casinos, abandoned Soviet-era structures, and coffee vending machines, Svilengrad is a ghost town of concrete and black-top. The days are blindingly bright and the nights cave dark. Civilization feels truly remote.
Grisebach’s film begins as it will conclude nearly three hours later: in media res. Like a nomadic gunslinger, the cragged and sinewy Said (Syuleyman Letifov, a non-professional actor like most of the film’s cast) rolls into town in an old Passat, holstering a flip phone instead of a Colt. With her effortless restraint, Grisebach assuredly reveals not only that Said is not a stranger to Svilengrad, but that he in fact has a storied past there.
Even more of a minimalist riff on the western than Western, Grisebach’s film is about bad men, lawless communities and the perilous survival of the women who reside there. Said crosses paths with an old acquaintance Veska (Yana Radeva), back in town to oversee a mountaintop archeological dig. An abstracted two-hander, The Dreamed Adventure explores the mysterious relationship of these two, yet for a long stretch it settles on Veska’s journey alone as her past is revealed to be as checkered as Said’s. Her nerves prove just as steely as well.
Writing about Western in Artforum, James Quandt praised it as a “a triple portrait—of a dusty, sun-baked Bulgarian village; of a company of German laborers who arrive to work on its power plant; and of a taciturn, middle-aged loner among the foreigners.” In The Dreamed Adventure Grisebach once again works on a threefold register: the distant world of antiquity being unearthed through the excavation, the near histories shared by the film’s characters and the present tense history unfolding in plain sight of exploitation, corruption and petty crime. Though Grisebach tips her hat to genre tropes with a menacingly restrained crime boss (Stoicho Kostadinov) and plenty of numbskull toughs, she also fills The Dreamed Adventure with a rich ensemble of everyday people just getting by. Whether they are Polish women hiding out at an abandoned hotel or the varied configurations of world-weary locals gathered around large tables, smoking, drinking, reminiscing and bullshitting. After waiting nearly a decade for Grisebach to deliver The Dreamed Adventure, we have been rewarded with a low-key epic of lingering mystery and rugged intrigue.
The Dreamed Adventure screens Saturday at the Smith Rafael Film Center and Sunday at BAMPFA as part of the 49th Mill Valley Film Festival.
