For those who have seen German director Valeska Grisebach’s well-received 2017 third feature Western, they know that the titles of her movies can be deliberately misleading. Set on a stalled construction site in which nothing much happens, although there’s always a fair amount of tension boiling just beneath the surface, the film was an exercise in dramatic restraint that set up a western-style showdown that never came — nor was it ever really supposed to.
The Dreamed Adventure (Das Geträumte Abenteuer), a gritty, chatty small-town thriller that premiered in competition in Cannes, makes the misdirection of its title clear from the opening sequence. Tracking an aging driver, Said (Syuleyman Letifov), as he steers his busted old sedan down a highway, then down a bunch of broken-down roads, finally making his way into a tiny frontier city that looks like it was left to rot back in the late 1980s, there is definitely nothing dreamy about the film’s principal setting.
The Dreamed Adventure
The Bottom Line
Intriguing and meandering.
