If Knives Out weren’t a lark it would look something like Sweet Dreams (Zoete Dromen), a thriller from the Netherlands where the usual murder mystery is sharpened by a hit of oppression mixed with anti-colonial hatred.
It’s a lovely-looking, lushly colourful movie set around 1900 in the Dutch East Indies where the white colonists are running a sugar-factory concern and living the high life indoors – dressing entirely in white for dinner, dining on sucking pig – while the brown folk do all the work outdoors.
Unlike the usual Agatha Christie-style whodunit, all the sublimated stuff gets given its moment in the sun. There are servants who they simmer with resentment. There are natives who work out in the fields and other natives who work in the house – resentment again, on either side. Some of them plot to end oppressive white rule and others go along with it, though they know they have been bought off.
Also made apparent is the threadbare nature of the colonial project by this point. The family is broke. The sugar factory isn’t making enough money and in any case the workers are all on strike, determined not to pick up tools until they’ve been paid for this year’s harvesting and processing.
It’s the second film by the Amsterdam-based, Bosnia-born writer/director Ena Sendijarević and she cooks up a tasty broth of secrets and lies centring on the death of the Dutch patriarch, Jan, and the revelation, when his will is read, that he’s left everything to Karel, the little boy he had with the house servant, Siti.
Enter, with nose very much out of joint, Jan’s “real son” Cornelis, a prissy and angry new arrival from the mother country, and his complaining angry and massively pregnant wife Josefien, who can’t get much man action out of her husband so starts casting her eyes at Reza, the bolshy field worker in turn casting his eyes at Siti, whose position inside the house gives her an edge she is determined to maintain.
No more plot necessary, though there is more to reveal as Sendijarević spins out a personal-is-political tale of intrigue and plot involving the potential murder of Karel by Cornelis, if sappy Cornelis can man up enough to do the deed.
It is all woven together very well, the them-and-us and the here-and-now jostling up against regular reminders that death is all around – a fly impaled by Agathe’s pen after she’s written to Cornelis to tell him his father is dead, the rotting corpse of Jan, the stink of which cannot be got out of the house. The imagery of her DP Emo Weemhoff is painterly and influenced by the Dutch Masters, interiors in warm colours like orange and red, to contrast with the endless variety of greens of the jungle lurking right outside the door.
The performances are deliberately like something from Murder on the Orient Express and are gorgeously florid – Renée Soutendijk as the hanging-on-by-her-fingernails wife of philandering Jan (Hans Dagelet), determined to die in this speck of reclaimed jungle. Hayati Azis as Siti, the focus of the entire thing, whose almond eyes and pursed lips play resentful symphonies as Siti waits for her moment – she’s the mother of the heir, if that isn’t just a cruel joke the foreigners are playing on her. Muhammad Khan as Reza, scheming rebellion but really just wanting to get out of here with Siti on his arm. Florian Myjer as the ninny Cornelis. The particularly excellent Lisa Zweerman as Josefien, hot, bothered, bitten to death and constantly craving sex.
A gothic finale awaits all parties and there is death and mayhem before the swift 102 minutes’ running time are done. A very stylish, deeply politicised and highly entertaining new take on a very familiar genre.
Sweet Dreams – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
