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The digs the past – and hides the secrets of the present – with the themes of Valeska Grisebach complex, clever, opaque new play drama that seems to prevent some of its meaning to explain to the audience, moment by moment. It is established, as his previous Western filmin the remote and mountainous country of Bulgaria, where the memory of the Balkan wars (and the pre-communist era) is still fresh and where there is money to be made and aid to be used against those who are ruthless enough.
Like the Western, Grisebach uses idle people in many dinner-and-drink-and-reminisce scenes with people gathered around tables shooting the wind, scenes that need no other reason to exist, other than their simple, wasted energy. And as before, Grisebach shows an interest in sticking to familiar templates – although the film adheres to Chekhov’s old rule about what happens with a gun that is made in one thing (well, do two in this case), criticism is not the usual occurrence of violence. I noticed that in the course of the film, Grisebach was feeling and directing his approach in detail to a meaning that he (and we) had not really reached.
Veska (Yana Radeva) is the woman who is running the excavations Matochina in south-eastern Bulgaria. Out of the blue, he runs into an old friend (or maybe more); this is Saïd (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov), a bankrupt businessman who has arrived in the area (he hasn’t been in years) to buy stolen diesel from an up-and-coming civilian named Raven. Saïd rejects an offer to help the people-trafficking ring, a very profitable one: the largest organized crime business in this part of central Europe.
In fact, Saïd’s character is now frowned upon by many of the locals, who remember his theft of tobacco products – in which Veska was involved, before re-inventing himself as an excavator – and Saïd’s dealings with a gangster boss named Illya who wants to build a road in Veska’s excavation site. Saïd’s old Passat car from the 90s is stolen, maybe to smuggle people, maybe to warn him, and in fact Saïd disappears – although not, and without a clear explanation. In his absence, Veska forces herself to sell the ordinary diesel that Saïd has bought, although the mechanics of doing this mysteriously happen off-screen. Veska is difficult, because of all her feminine, feminine behavior, and she wants to confront Illya about the violence and brutality of her trading business that she has known for years and threatens to include a young girl who works in Veska’s excavation.
The interest of the film is not really in any events, dreamy or real, but in the details: beautiful villages, noble restaurants and hotels of the communist era, and a group of people who pop up everywhere, including a group of Polish women who work near the solar factory. This last is a group of people who seem to be real, which Grisebach could not possibly refuse to include in his film. The Dreamed Adventure is clearly the work of a director with a familiar filmmaking language, but what he wants to tell us is rare.
