Step aside, Philip Marlowe — and no disrespect to the Dude — but few will ever match “The Dreamed Adventure” for unconventional screen detectives.
For one thing, our lead isn’t even a private eye: She’s an archaeologist, and happily so. For another, we don’t even recognize her as the lead until a hard reset at the 45-minute mark — the first of many fake-outs in Valeska Grisebach’s 164-minute drama, which closes out this year’s Cannes competition with a welcome dose of WTF.
Not that the film is particularly hard to follow, nor the filmmaker lost in her surroundings. Grisebach already mined this mountainous region in 2017’s “Western” — exploring a remote part of southern Bulgaria that borders Turkey and Greece — and she carries over that prior film’s star, opening this latest on the taciturn Saïd (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov).
A loner cut from the same cloth as Charles Bronson, Saïd moves through the world as a hard-boiled cowboy (fitting, given that the authors of dimestore potboilers showed little variance when toggling between westerns and crime); he never breaks a sweat, loses his cool or raises his voice, even as he returns to a one-horse town with scores still unsettled.
Saïd rekindles old flames by speaking in aphorisms (“Sometimes you dream of being an eagle, but in reality you’re an ape”). He’s also about 60 years old — as are most of the main figures here — a telling age given the timeline. All would have lived just as long under decaying communism as under its aftermath, which proved even worse, leaving the land wholly dependent on cross-border smuggling as the primary source of economic activity. Knowing full well the lay of the land, Saïd just brushes it off when he finds his ’95 Passat stolen. Things disappear here, and people as well — including our erstwhile hero.
Grisebach plants clues all the while, enmeshing Saïd in a turf war between two rival kingpins and brushing him up against rivals with long-held grudges. Only Veska (Yana Radeva) resists being pinned down once the spotlight falls on her. She too was born in this town and had her life cleaved in two — but Veska got out just in time, getting herself an education and with it a sinecure as an excavating archaeologist that protects her in more ways than one when she’s sent back to her hometown to unearth buried glories. (“Don’t underestimate how much ordinary folk long to find treasure,” Saïd tells her before going missing.)
Above all, hardboiled fiction moves by way of social access: the private eye can go anywhere, putting the screws to rich and poor alike, in back alleys as often as in ballrooms. Veska is very much the same, protected by her background as a native daughter with deep ties to everyone in town, her outsider status with a (presumably state-funded) revenue stream that allows her to give locals jobs on her dig. But above all she’s shielded by age. Though vibrant — and courted by several suitors — Veska is freed from being prey, giving her safe passage through many unsavory, macho circles.
“The Dreamed Adventure” wholly subverts genre tropes, hewing to a deliberately meandering pace as it embeds in this world with little narrative urgency. The ostensible missing-person case ultimately cares little about the central inquiry, all while animated by a keen sense of observation. This is a film of details and detours, digressive above all, cast with non-professionals native to the region. It plays as an ethnographic travelogue, using a potboiler hook for lightly applied narrative structure.
The film also has a strong feminist spine. Veska eventually recognizes her inability to solve the case — what’s one more missing piece in a land of trafficked goods? — yet she’s more than willing to keep pressing on its key players. A native daughter, our incurious investigator once carried a torch for the missing man and for the local kingpin, Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov), who holds far more sway than the mayor.
Befitting his top-dog status in a patriarchal system, Iliya and his ilk gauge power by its effect on women. Veska, whose survivor’s instinct runs deep — made plain by her unlikely veneration of Conan the Barbarian — does them one better by refusing to break, and by helping younger generations do the same. The film ultimately settles into a reckoning between these two poles.
That these narrative and thematic elements should resonate so clearly — at least in retrospect — belies one’s initial experience. Grisebach threads them into a film with a relaxed pace and unhurried runtime, stopping to smell the flowers and spill a few drops of vodka, as befits a sleepy town where little is urgent but the need to let loose. That such an open-ended ethnography should find a suitably nonchalant resolution to the central mystery is, in the end, the biggest plot twist of all.
