‘The Dreamed Adventure’ Review: Valeska Grisebach’s Wildly Audacious Small-Town-Gangster Epic Harvests Genre From the Drama of Real Life

Sometimes, a movie sneaks up on you, sidling in like a lamb and striding out like a lion, revealing its brilliance only after you’ve brushed away the sand and grit of first impressions. Much more rarely — in fact, corresponding exactly to the release rate of movies by visionary German director Valeska Grisebach — the brilliance goes bone-deep, emerging from an astonishingly new and strange filmic architecture. Grisebach’s fourth feature is just such a marvel, a verité social drama, cast with non-professionals, that from the improvisational immediacy of small-scale real life, gradually gathers all the elements of a sprawling crime epic. “The Dreamed Adventure” is basically a modern Bulgarian “The Godfather,” rangily reworked as a docudrama with suntanned arms, a squinting grin and a sly way of lolling back in its plastic chair as after-dinner conversation, sloshed and salty, rolls around the patio table. 

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The Bulgarian town of Svilengrad is close to both the Greek and Turkish borders and situated near a highway that leads to the second-busiest border-crossing in the world. It’s a place that millions have passed through but few, outside its actual inhabitants, have lingered in, despite attractions that proudly include, per the town’s wiki page, three DVD rental shops, two cinemas and a library. Said (Syuleyman Letifov, an auto-parts salesman whose only other acting credit is in Grisebach’s terrific “Western”), an erstwhile local with a ready smile and several lifetimes of experience etched into his affable, watchful face, is returning to the region for the first time in a long while. His windshield is smeared with the dust of a lengthy road journey. The landscape is baked and scrubby. He stops to buy water and make a phone call.

In Svilengrad, he checks into a lonely hotel, from outside which he discovers the next day his car has been stolen. By happy chance, he bumps into old flame Veska (Yana Radeva), who herself has only recently come back to her hometown to supervise an archaeological dig nearby. Veska offers to drive Said to a meeting he has arranged with a shady local “businessman” nicknamed The Raven, who we discover is involved in a turf war with even shadier bigwig Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov).

Said’s not-terribly-legal scheme involves the purchase of a large quantity of diesel from The Raven, but he still has time to join Veska up at the dig site, where locals of all ages have also gathered to help out. Said fixes their metal detector and immediately finds himself a centuries-old bauble, which just goes to prove this sandy mound is rich with relics from the past. He and Veska hang out, perhaps on the verge of rekindling their romance. And then Said vanishes. Fascinating though this whole set-up has been, it has been a fake-out: Said is not the protagonist. It is Veska who will now take the reins of the story, quietly investigating her ex-lover’s disappearance, taking over his diesel enterprise, and in the process running afoul of gangster Iliya — with whom she also has some thwarted romantic history.

It would be difficult to overstate how much the textures and tempo of this film — organically, unobtrusively shot by Bernhard Keller and quite brilliantly edited by Bettina Böhler — are alien to the way we’re used to seeing gangster-movie plotlines develop. Traditional docudramas fictionalize some aspect of factual experience, but “The Dreamed Adventure” (and if there’s a bone to pick here at all it maybe with that unedifying title) is nothing so trite as a true story. Instead it works to reverse that polarity, so that the hard-knock facts of everyday life around these parts seem to generate not just fiction, but genre, that most fictional of fictions.

During the film’s many discursive, seemingly off-the-cuff drinking and dining scenes, where different clusters of locals chatter loosely amongst themselves, stray comments and anecdotes — about a man who disappeared and is presumed to have been murdered, about the guy who was suspected of fathering so-and-so, or about some hoodlum hiding a package in the ceiling of a now-abandoned hotel — resurface later, as pivotal plot points. It is as though, with infinite care and staggering patience, Grisebach, co-writing with filmmaker Lisa Bierwirth, is picking at the loose threads and dropped stitches of deeply researched reality, and with the crochet hook of her peculiarly pointed attention fashioning from them an entirely new garment. 

It isn’t simply that we get the pleasures of genre — the peril, the mystery, the guns and the showdowns — encoded so cleverly into a deeply authentic portrait of a close-knit community, whose networks of everyone-knows-everyone relationships would ordinarily be inaccessible to outsiders. It’s also that Grisebach’s take on the sprawling crime-saga narrative is itself subversive. At the movies, mysterious disappearances that cue a hero’s rescue mission are usually those of young women and girls, preferably white, bonus points for blonde. But it is Said’s unexplained absence that cues Veska to turn gumshoe, placing a well-liked, worldly, middle-aged woman of quick wits and cowboy bravado into that usually masculine role.

And then Grisebach uses that distaff twist once again, to comment more broadly on the patriarchal nature and gendered violence of power structures corrupted by historical conflict. And on the inescapable cycle of oppression that occurs when everyday people — wrung-out by the effort of simply getting by and jaded at the idea that anything can ever change — choose an exhausted form of collaboration with their oppressors, keeping their secrets and shielding their misdeeds, knowing exactly where the bodies are buried and the firearms are stashed, but never digging them up. It makes the tiny borderland nowheresville of Svilengrad into a microcosm that can be scaled up to reflect the national and international socio-politics of this sorry moment in history.

Not to suggest that “The Dreamed Adventure” is all dour commentary. Veska also has a touchingly protective big-sisterly relationship with Maria (Denislava Yordanova), the young woman who lives next door, as well as several slow-simmering romantic options — and what a quietly revolutionary idea it is for a woman of her age onscreen to be accorded with desire and desirability. And the film always derives a crackle of life from its spontaneous-feeling construction, which occasionally even manifests as roughness, as when the odd line of post-dubbed dialogue slips noticeably out of sync.

But it has never been about formal polish for Grisebach, who is more concerned with finding ways to deploy her colloquial, vernacular filmmaking to make visible the cinematically invisible, and to frame her characters with an absence of judgment so complete it’s a most unsentimental kind of love. And, in the case of Veska (wonderfully played by geologist-turned-croupier-turned-cosmetics-seller Radeva), identification too. Indeed, it is hard not to conflate the Grisebach of “The Dreamed Adventure” with her intensely impressive heroine, as a woman out on her own, doing something no one else would think to do, in a place few take notice of, and finding treasure.