Valeska Grisebach returns with a magnificent drama in which a Bulgarian archaeologist becomes mixed up in criminal dealings on the Turkish-Greek border.
In Valeska Grisebach’s last film, from 2017, a German laborer in Bulgaria to work on an infrastructure project explores the hillsides around a Bulgarian village on foot and horseback, wandering through a rugged landscape populated by wary natives and rowdy outsiders, a taciturn loner facing down his rivals in a series of masculine standoffs. Though set in the present day, and alluding to the wider dynamics between the EU’s haves and have-nots, the film was accurately titled Western. Her long-anticipated new feature is also set in Bulgaria, and is likewise a moral tale about contemporary economic realities shaped around the contours of a classic Hollywood genre – The Dreamed Adventure could be called Noir. Layered and leisurely, it keeps accumulating interest and significance for its entire 167-minute runtime. It was worth the wait, and more.
Syuleyman Letifov, who played a village operator in Western, is what counts for a familiar face among the German Grisebach’s cast of Bulgarian nonprofessionals (the credits are in both German and Bulgarian). He plays Said, a member of Bulgaria’s Muslim Pomak minority, who drives down to Svilengrad, near the Greek and Turkish border, in the film’s casually masterful opening sequence, a car journey through landscapes that change with the weather, rumbly hairpin mountain turns giving way to bleak drags through farmland to the sprawl of arterial roads past drab gas stations and shuttered casinos, a cultural geography that mirrors in miniature the rapacious capitalist transformation of the society in which the story will take place.
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Said is there to buy black-market diesel from a smuggler called “the Raven” – a small-time deal for Said, who used to live in Svilengrad during the gold-rush years of the early 90s after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when even pay toilets were big business, and all you had to do to get a girl, one local gangster nostalgically recalls, was open up the door of your car. These days, Polish women who work at a nearby solar panel factory are shuttled every day to and from an otherwise abandoned hotel, a former mafia hangout which may still have a weapons cache stored somewhere in the wall, like ancient artifacts. The Raven is rumored to be involved in human trafficking, making him a rival to Svilengrad’s kingpin Iliya (Stoicho Kostadinov), with whom Said has a long history. He’s offered a chance to start making some real money again, but seems to only want to stay in town long enough to track down the sister of a man who was notoriously murdered about 30 years ago.
In the meantime, Said meets and warmly greets old acquaintance Veska (Yana Radeva), an archaeologist who invites him to help out at her dig site in the nearby hills. She has extended a similar invitation to a number of locals, many of whom have their own relationships with the local crime bosses, who may use an old man’s land as a smuggling route, or recruit a teenage girl to come to one of their parties. Veska, an educated and well-traveled woman, is a subject of some suspicion in town, but she’s local and has her own long history with Svilengrad’s leading men; when Said is absented from the narrative, quite surprisingly and ambiguously, Veska takes an interest in his unfinished business. What follows is sort of a distaff Red Harvest, as Veska pokes her nose into everyone’s business, and refusing to take sides even as she cultivates relationships and involves herself in side schemes. While her dig is paused – the mayor is dragging his feet on resurfacing the road to the site, presumably awaiting a bribe or a called-in favor – Veska occupies herself digging up secrets and resurfacing memories.
Before he drops away from the film, Said’s job at Veska’s site is to operate the metal detector, and Grisebach’s own approach is similarly attuned to the treasures of happenstance. In a recurrent scene in both Western and here, a character leaves their lodging at night to simply wander around, invariably ending up taking an empty seat at a table full of empty glasses of raika, soaking up old stories in the bug-lamp glow of a long hot summer night. This happens several times in Western, to both Said and Veska, and each scene is different – sometimes women share recollections of mistreatment in the Wild West 90s; sometimes boasting men get flirty – but they have in common a sense of communal life conjured for the viewer through sheer serendipity. Grisebach, like her protagonists, is endlessly curious, and her qualitative field work in Bulgaria she turns up endless evocative locations – a Persian-style luxury hotel, a ruined medieval tower, an empty strobe-lit nightclub, the plastic chairs grouped around a vending machine – all populated by people wearing flashy or secondhand fast fashion, with faces that have a story to tell, found by Grisebach and inserted into her scenario.
Though her films have come about once a decade since her 2005 breakthrough Longing, making it hard to associate her with any peers, Grisebach in the first years of her career, in the early 2000s, was strongly associated with the analytical rigor of the Berlin School. Like Christian Petzold, she coolly tallies the microtransactions – the envelopes of cash, the proffered rides home – that make up the ledger of social relations in a market economy. The plot of The Dreamed Adventure is oblique – like Raymond Chandler, Grisebach is more interested in atmosphere than exposition. With dozens of speaking parts, and backstories that characters reveal only reluctantly, the clockwork of the film’s plotting is often muted, but if you should be attentive to any one thing in a given scene, it’s the status of the characters. Just as Veska’s team must painstakingly brush the dust off their finds to discover what they’ve unearthed, The Dreamed Adventure allows its scenes to unfold slowly, warily, and a whole hierarchy comes into focus through small gestures of defiance or deference. Veska is expert at defusing tense situations without being overpowered, finding release valves in aggressive encounters boiling into violence; she also lets off her own steam when recounting her own bitter experiences in patient, incendiary but not outraged late-night monologues.
Despite its aridity, Western had a tender heart, eventually exposed through halting conversations between welcoming Bulgarians and the German worker in search of connection. The Dreamed Adventure is as humanist, and more expansive, cohering in its final stretch into a sweeping consideration of gender roles, articulated by Veska in both word and deed, as she draws the crew of her dig out of the dog-eat-dog world of Svilengrad and envelops them in her alternative community like a den mother, with protectiveness and tenderness.
As an ultimately warm and feminist voyage to the new frontiers of capitalism, The Dreamed Adventure is as panoramic as Toni Erdmann, and like Maren Ade’s film, it always comes back to the performances at its center: Letifov, with his John Wayne squint and cherubic dimples, and especially Radveva, in her first-ever film performance, with her wise, weathered face and spine of steel. She’d be a star even if Grisebach hadn’t found her and put her in a movie, but it’s to cinema’s benefit that she did.
