Di rector: Sando Heijnen
Writer: Sando Heijnen
Cast: Rafaël van der Ziel & Mara Linde Tieleman
Running time: 3mins
Voices on the radio echo around an unseen car interior, the unmistakable bass reverberating the tragic news throughout the space. Somewhere in the Netherlands, a house has exploded, probably related to a faulty gas pipe. Elsewhere, a road is closed due to a traffic incident, with the dispassionate voice-over offering advice on how to avoid disruption.
There are two horrific human events are at the heart of both these stories, but the way most of us would hear about them – if at all – is strange and distant. The nightmare implicit, obscured by euphemistic pleasantries. Daily existence continues within its pre-determined borders, the walls of other houses, the rigid boundaries of a motorway, and we proceed as if the known-unknowns which should give us pause for thought, are just a dream.
In the wake of every tragedy, we are encouraged to keep our heads down – life must go on. But often this is at the expense of thinking about how the social expectations we keep our noses to the grind for; might actually contribute to the distant horrors the radio informs us about. As the name might suggest, Sando Heijnen’s Nur Geträumt (in English, Just a Dream) plays with this weird emotional disconnect – and leaves us wondering how healthy, or natural, any of it really is.
Throughout the extremely short amount of time it runs for, we gain sudden glimpses into people’s deepest fears and feelings, but which immediately fade to the back amid the insistence of ‘normal’ life. After the film’s dash-cam sequence gets things started – introducing a diegetic car radio bearing grim news – Rafaël van der Ziel’s character steps out of his souped-up racer, and directly addressed the camera to tell us he has exhausted himself chasing thrills in a world that has left him “bored”. He calls to his girlfriend, Mara Linde Tieleman, to invite her for a ride – and before replying to him, she turns to us as well, to explain that her own life has become a “permanent gap-year”.
Neither responds to the other’s revelation – because we have been granted insight into their inner monologues. But these aren’t sentiments that are truly impossible to figure out – they are knowable unknowns if we really pause to think about the people we brush past on a daily basis. They are ideas we might well guess were buzzing around in the mind of the poor soul blown apart in his apartment, or the anonymised victims of the road incident – and we can know that, because they are living in the same on-the-rails life as we are. They are pushed to give up on their real ambitions, to fit into a dwindling number of boxes; to feign caring about ‘productivity’; to couple and procreate, and to maintain a way of life that can only exist by crushing their individuality.
If you don’t want to know what happens, come back to this after you’ve seen the film. I’ll do my best not to spell it out – but I think you might well guess where things are going by the rest of what I have to say.
What Heijnen seems to have done here, is to turn a world of half-conscious statistics on its head. In this dreamlike world, we have been reminded that the other figures in it aren’t nearly distant enough for us to get comfortable. These are people who are unfulfilled, and prone to self-destructive behaviour to try and feel alive in an artless and uncaring social-economic order. And so are we. Once we are reminded of that, thoughts about what pushes ourselves or others into this mode of living are impossible to escape – and there is no keeping your head down for the sake of ‘life going on’ in this case.
The technical work of cinematographer Boris Peter and post-sound mixer Bram van Kaauwen make this especially compelling. To chilling effect, one moment more than any other trashes the distance we usually maintain between ourselves and strangers’ misfortunes. The vibrant 4:3 visuals take a vast field, flanked by trees into their scope – the enormity of the image, with a distant, tiny tractor for scale, suggesting we are once again safely removed from the pain of others. But as peaceful as the scene might be, reminiscent of something from a child’s picture-book, it is disrupted by the rasping, agonised moans of one of the strangers whose agony we are no longer immune to.
At least, that is my reading.
This is a film that comes in under four minutes – and as an extremely abstract micro-short, you may well reach different conclusions. Whatever those conclusions are, however, that feels appropriate. After all, this is only a dream – open to interpretation. But from where I am sitting, it feels like it is quite brilliantly hinting at a nightmare that is all too real.
To some extent, Nur Geträumt is probably also a simple experiment for Heijnen. The first time (as far as I have seen with IFL at least) that he has been the sole writer for his story; and he has used it as an opportunity to play about with different filmmaking technology and levels of fidelity, producing an eery visual bubble-gum where perspectives and themes can shift too and from the foreground, leaving us wondering where we really stand. Perhaps he now knows better how to deploy them in a bigger project some time in the future. But taking this as a stand-alone film in its own right, he has already done so most effectively. Personally, I would have favoured just a little more time to spend with the two characters before we get on the road – maybe other opportunities to hear their thoughts, or the chance to understand their relationship better – but broadly, this is a wonderful, minimalistic treatise on the inane nightmares we try to sweep under the rug, to keep sane while engaging in a way of life that is actively pushing us to the brink.