A Slow-Burn Border Town Thriller

For those who have seen German director Valeska Grisebach’s well-received 2017 third feature Western, they know that the titles of her movies can be deliberately misleading. Set on a stalled construction site in which nothing much happens, although there’s always a fair amount of tension boiling just beneath the surface, the film was an exercise in dramatic restraint that set up a western-style showdown that never came — nor was it ever really supposed to.

The Dreamed Adventure (Das Geträumte Abenteuer), a gritty, chatty small-town thriller that premiered in competition in Cannes, makes the misdirection of its title clear from the opening sequence. Tracking an aging driver, Said (Syuleyman Letifov), as he steers his busted old sedan down a highway, then down a bunch of broken-down roads, finally making his way into a tiny frontier city that looks like it was left to rot back in the late 1980s, there is definitely nothing dreamy about the film’s principal setting.

Nor is there anything all that dreamlike about what happens for the next 164 minutes, which follow Said, but only for a little while, as he returns to a place he left several years ago for mysterious reasons. Back for what looks like an illicit new business venture, he gets his crappy car stolen on the first night and then immediately runs into an old friend, Veska (Yana Radeva), who’s also returned home after a long absence — in her case to manage an archaeological dig up in the hills that border neighboring Turkey.

There seems to be a romance brewing between the two 50-somethings, although Grisebach and co-writer Lisa Bierwith never bring it to much more than a low simmer. This is because lots of bad things are happening around the would-be lovers’ native town of Svilengrad, which, as someone rightly claims, “begins where the law ends.” Filled with traffickers, smugglers and profiteers, most of them working for a local kingpin, Ilya (Stoicho Kostadinov), who owns the only house in the area that isn’t falling apart — he also has an in-ground swimming pool and a pond filled with imported turtles — Svilengrad is the perfect backdrop for what could have been an intense homecoming crime drama.   

But this is a Valeska Grisebach movie, so even if the stakes initially seem high, the director does everything she can not to deliver a predictable action-packed suspenser, but rather an intermittently fascinating and frustrating portrait of a place that’s been left to the dogs. Much of The Dreamed Adventure is devoted to docu-style conversation scenes involving groups of non-actors — many of them Svilengrad locals — chatting with the lead cast over healthy servings of food and alcohol, reminiscing about what their town used to be like and what it has since become. The ambiance is friendly and the people are accommodating, even if they lead difficult lives threatened by poverty and corruption, both of which are rampant in what was once a rather thriving casino resort on the frontier.

The main plot, which involves some very old beef between Said and Ilya, is subtly woven and sometimes gets lost in digressions, though Grisebach manages to brings things together by the last act. Before that happens, Said disappears for a good 90 minutes, leaving Veska to casually investigate what her long lost friend has been up to. The switcheroo that the director pulls between the two protagonists, starting her film with Said but then losing him for a chunk of the running time, can also prove a bit aggravating, especially because actor Letifov (who was also in Western) has such a photogenic face. (After the film’s Cannes press screening, a friend described him as the Bulgarian Ian McKellen.)

Said’s absence allows Veska to take over and to push the film in a new direction — one more concerned with the treatment of women in a place ruled by virile, drunken men involved in all kinds of illegal activities. The Dreamed Adventure may not be a western either, but it depicts a reckless one-horse town where there’s always been a clear hierarchy between the sexes. As an educated woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone, Veska is able to navigate the place more freely than others, slowly piecing together the puzzle of Said’s past and confronting Ilya about his evil ways. She also tries to stop a young neighbor of hers (Denislava Yordanova) from becoming another female victim in a long line of them.

This sounds more intriguing on paper than it is to watch, although both Radeva and Letifov, who are non-professionals as well, make for compelling leads. But even in scenes of high tension, Grisebach prefers to keep things relatively calm, lending a naturalistic flair to the action that makes it feel purposely anticlimactic. An old handgun is recovered at some point and eventually used, though probably in the least dramatic way possible, while showdowns between the main characters occur during more long conversations involving yet more liquor. This may be the way things go down in Svilengrad, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s enough to sustain a two-and-a-half hour narrative.

You can’t fault Grisebach for trying to make something original here: a border town thriller that, instead of delivering thrills, dishes out loads of social commentary. The director uses her loose crime movie template to chronicle a place still trapped in its troubled past — a past that gets dug up like all the ancient artifacts excavated by Veska and her crew — while facing a future of inertia and decline. Said is also caught in the past, as is Veska to an extent. Even when people manage to leave Svilengrad they somehow wind up back there. The best anyone can do is stick around and keep dreaming.