Directed by Sendijarević, filmed by Emo Weemhoff and edited by Lot Rossmark, “Sweet Dreams” is aestheticized to within a millimeter of its life. The film is shot in a square 4×3 “Academy” ratio, primarily through wide-angle lenses that cartoonishly distort people and objects (especially when the camera changes position rapidly). Almost all establishing shots are framed symmetrically, not in the manner of Stanley Kubrick or Wes Anderson, but in a fetish fan art inspired by them. The objects and people within each shot are arranged like elements in a glass art installation. The movie is a zoo with people in it. The film observes its characters with coldly analytical precision, often withering, up to a point.
Then everything finally gives way to something more overtly lyrical and even dreamlike. The film seems to lose interest in satire and slapstick and takes more detours to present a surprising, strange, and often beautiful image or situation (often one involving the elemental forces: water, fire, wind, and earth). The story does not end but stops, only after offering a series of moments and scenes that are filmed and edited (in one case, crosswise) with a mysterious but inexplicable deliberation that is a hallmark of modern expressionist art. .
Some of the flights of fancy in the last twenty minutes are so beautiful that they retroactively make the early parts of the film seem like an overbearing warm-up to what's truly special and memorable about the project. There's a very long take near the end that's as surprising and excessive but perfect as the one in David Lynch and Mark Frost's “Twin Peaks: The Return,” where a man cleans the entire floor of a bar while Booker T. and the MGs They record “Green.” Onion “develops the full extent of her. It could be that this is a filmmaker who becomes more vital and unique the more deeply he connects with her subconscious and the more completely she surrenders to him.
