GLR September-October 2025

for each other or about their lives. It’s a tale of two people who fall into each other’s orbit almost by accident and never quite figure out what they’re doing there. W E ’ RE BACK IN S CANDINAVIA —Norway this time—for Dreams (Sex Love) , a contemporary drama centering on a female high school student that becomes an exploration of three generations of women and a sublimated lesbian love affair. The story is told through the eyes of fifteen-year-old Johanne, who records her intense thoughts and feelings about her French teacher Johanna (almost the same name) in a diary, mixing dreams and real events in a way that will later cast a shadow on their relationship. What’s certain is that Johanne has a massive crush on her teacher and longs to have an intimate connection. But longing is not the same as doing, and while Johanne spends many hours in Johanna’s flat—mostly learning how to knit—the extent of their physical interaction is unclear. This ambiguity comes to the fore after Johanne shares the memoir with her grandmother, who shows it to Johanne’s mother. The older woman sees it as

two daughters—one of whom is Frances’ mother Hannah (Olivia Colman)—in pursuit of a more tolerant environment after coming out as gay. Everyone is super-tolerant of both Jimpa and Frances, including the latter’s parents and Jimpa’s live-in personal assistant Richard. Hannah, a filmmaker who’s making a movie about her father’s colorful life, argues with her producers, insisting that it’s possible to make a film without a conflict of any kind. A plot begins to emerge in Jimpa when Frances reveals that they have been secretly plotting to remain behind and live with Jimpa for a year—partly to escape their unsupportive school in Adelaide. Hannah responds with a mother’s concern and tries to get Frances to reconsider. Jimpa shows his age by expressing decidedly politically incorrect opinions on bisexuality and the word “queer,” causing Frances to have second thoughts. What makes this film interesting is not so much the charac ters’ interactions in the present as the disclosure of their back stories through intermittent flashbacks in both Australia and Amsterdam. We learn how Jim came to live in Europe in the 1970s, becoming a gay activist and later turning HIV-positive; and how Frances came out as nonbinary and, in parallel fashion, resolved to leave Australia fifty years later. Whether that plan will be realized has yet to be determined. W E LEAVE N ORTHERN E UROPE behind at last for a passage to India, its climatic opposite, where manicured interiors give way to the crowded indoor-outdoor spaces of a hotter clime. Most of Cactus Pears takes place in a farming village a day’s train-ride from Mumbai, which is where the main character, Anand, re sides. We meet Anand as he’s leaving home and traveling to the village of his father, who has just died and needs to be given a proper sendoff. According to Hindu custom, this is a ten-day af fair that requires strict adherence to ritual practice, much of it in volving Anand as the last unmarried son. Indeed Anand’s marital status will be a major topic of dis cussion when he reunites with his extended family and in-laws. Among them is Balya, a handsome man about his age (pushing thirty) whom Anand hasn’t seen since they were teenagers. In many ways they’re a study in contrasts: Anand has a white-col lar job in Mumbai, while Balya is a farmer who herds goats and does odd jobs. But they share one thing in common: both are having to cope with mounting family pressure to get married and make a family. And since they’re both resisting this pressure for the same reason, the possibility of a hookup hangs in the sultry air. It’s hinted that they may have fooled around as teenagers, but it still takes them a while to break the silence and make a first move. Released in India this year, Cactus Pears may be seen as a plea for understanding and a challenge to the marriage impera tive for men. To a Western audience, it’s a reminder that mar riage has traditionally been an economic relationship and an arranged affair—both men’s relatives are actively looking for potential wives—a social expectation that we’ve largely left be hind. Indeed the gradual shift to “marriage for love” in the West is probably what made same-sex marriage possible, and “love” is the argument that ultimately won people over. Whether this argument is strong enough to overcome tradition and keep Anand and Balya together becomes the question that propels this film to its conclusion.

Ella Øverbye and Selome Emnetu in Dreams (Sex Love).

a harmless crush, while the mother raises questions of propriety and even criminality on the teacher’s part. Both women are writ ers, and both are impressed by the memoir’s literary merit. Gram shows the manuscript to her publisher, who loves it, but she suddenly turns against the project (professional jealousy?) and withholds this information from her granddaughter, even as the mother is beginning to see it as the opening salvo in her daughter’s literary career. The film’s technique, which is brilliantly executed, is to in tersperse narrative passages from the memoir with actual dialog or other interaction between the characters. The latter serves as a reality check on the intense feelings and vulnerabilities of a fifteen-year-old girl in love and helps to separate her fantasies from the tamer reality. And yet, as the film’s title, Dreams , sug gests, the truth is never as cut-and-dried as it appears. J OHN L ITHGOW STARS in the title role of Jimpa —a portmanteau of “Jim” and “grandpa”—as a brilliant and flamboyant profes sor living in Amsterdam. He’s the grandfather of a nonbinary “grandthing,” as he calls the fifteen-year-old Frances, who has arrived in Amsterdam with their mother and father from their home in Adelaide, Australia. We learn that Jim left Australia many years ago, having sired

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