‘The Dreamed Adventure’ review: A slow-burn thriller set in a frontier town that manages to both fascinate and depress at the same time

For those who have seen German director Waleska Griesbach’s well-received 2017 third film westernThey know that her movie titles can be intentionally misleading. Set on a stalled construction site where not much happens, though there’s a fair amount of tension simmering just beneath the surface, the film was an exercise in dramatic restraint that led to a Western-style showdown that never happened — and wasn’t really meant to happen.

The adventure you dreamed of (Das Geträumte Abenteuer), a gritty small-town thriller that premiered in competition at Cannes, makes clear the misdirection of its title from its opening sequence. Tracking down an elderly chauffeur, Said (Suleiman Letivov), drives his beat-up old sedan down a highway, then across a set of broken down roads, and finally makes his way to a small border town that looks like it was left to rot in the late 1980s, and there’s certainly nothing dreamy about the film’s main setting.

There is nothing dreamlike about what happens over the next 164 minutes, which follows Saeed, but only for a short time, as he returns to the place he left several years ago for mysterious reasons. Back in what looks like an illicit new business venture, his crappy car is stolen on the first night and he immediately runs into an old friend, Veska (Jana Radeva), who has also returned home after a long absence – in her case to run an archaeological excavation in the hills bordering neighboring Turkey.

There seems to be a romance brewing between two fifty-somethings, though Griesbach and co-writer Lisa Berwith never take it beyond a low-key lull. That’s because a lot of bad things happen around the would-be lovers’ home city of Svilingrad, which, as one rightly claims, “begins where the law ends.” Filled with traffickers, smugglers and profiteers, most of whom work for a local gang leader, Ilya (Stoicho Kostadinov), who owns the only house in the area that hasn’t collapsed — and also has an underground swimming pool and a pond filled with imported turtles — Svilengrad is the perfect backdrop for what could have been an intense homecoming crime drama.

But this is a Valeska Grisebach film, so even if the stakes initially seem high, the director does everything she can not to deliver a predictable action-packed thriller, but instead a fascinating, intermittently depressing portrait of a place left to the dogs. Lots of The adventure you dreamed of Devoted to documentary-style conversation scenes involving groups of non-actors – many of them Svilengrad locals – talking with the main cast over healthy portions of food and alcohol, reminiscing about what their city used to be and what it has become since. The atmosphere is friendly and the people are helpful, even if they live a hard life threatened by poverty and corruption, both of which are common in what was once a fairly thriving casino resort on the frontier.

The main plot, which involves some very old beef between Sayid and Elijah, is subtly woven and occasionally gets lost in digressions, though Greissback manages to pull things together in the final act. Before that happens, Sayid disappears for 90 minutes, leaving Visca to casually investigate what her long-lost friend has been doing. The switch the director pulls between the two leads, starting her film with Said and then losing him for part of the running time, can be a bit annoying, especially since the actor Letivov (who was also in the film) western) He has such an attractive face. (After the film’s press screening at Cannes, a friend described him as the Bulgarian Ian McKellen.)

Said’s absence allows Veska to take control and push the film in a new direction – one concerned with the treatment of women in a place ruled by drunken masculine men involved in all sorts of illegal activities. The adventure you dreamed of It may not be a Western either, but it depicts a reckless one-horse city where there is always a clear gender hierarchy. As an educated woman who takes nothing from anyone, Visca is able to move around the place more freely than most, slowly piecing together the puzzle of Sayid’s past and confronting Elijah about his evil ways. She also tries to prevent her young neighbor (Denislava Yordanova) from becoming another victim in a long line of them.

This sounds more interesting on paper than it does on watch, although both Radeva and Letivov, also non-professionals, provide compelling leads. But even in the most tense scenes, Grisebach prefers to keep things relatively calm, bringing a naturalism to the action that makes it seem deliberately climatic. An old revolver is recovered at one point and eventually used, although perhaps in the least dramatic way possible, while confrontations between the main characters occur during longer conversations involving more alcoholic beverages. This may be the way things work in Svelingrad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s enough to sustain a two-and-a-half-hour narrative.

You can’t blame Grisebach for trying to make something original here: a border-town thriller that, instead of offering thrills, offers plenty of social commentary. The director uses her loose crime thriller template to chronicle a place still trapped in its turbulent past — a past that is being excavated like all the ancient artifacts unearthed by Visca and her crew — while facing a future of stagnation and decline. Sayid has also been arrested in the past, as has Visca to some extent. Even when people manage to leave Svilingrad, they somehow end up there. The best thing anyone can do is stay put and keep dreaming.