Can life and love intersect in two separate dreams occurring at the same time to two different people? Sweet Dreams, a fluffy and fuzzy rom-com starring Mithila Palkar, Amol Parashar and Sauraseni Maitra, would have us believe that they can. The film is predicated on that fantastical notion. Willing suspension of disbelief, anyone?
In support of its ‘dreamy’ narrative construct that moves between the real and the apparently imagined, the film, a Jio Studios presentation directed by Victor Mukherjee and out on Hotstar+Disney, enlists William Shakespeare and Hamlet. In a stray scene, it casually evokes what the Prince of Denmark said to a friend: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
It is easy to buy into Shakespeare. Getting into the swing of Sweet Dreams takes some doing. But once that challenge is surmounted, the film might just pass muster as some harmless fun, undemanding but quirky enough to merit a viewing.
Another quote about the potency of the human imagination heralds the start of the flip and flappy Sweet Dreams. “A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities,” a title card reads. The Nathaniel Hawthorne line is misattributed to J.R.R. Tolkien.
The film strikes other false notes but most of them are papered over sufficiently owing to the inoffensive, gently diverting and at times endearing quality of the exercise. It is guilty of laying too much store by two young people who take their dreams so seriously that it leads to their lives being all but derailed.
Take that in your stride and Sweet Dreams might just find the predicament of the two extra-sensory lovers intriguing. The heroine refers to the pure bliss of watching a film while munching popcorn. This concoction may not be quite that crunchy but it does have the weirdness quotient to be acceptably fascinating notwithstanding the oversimplified glibness all around.
Kenneth “Kenny” Fernandes (Parashar) and Dia Jaisingh (Palkar) not only dream daily of each other without ever having met, but they also spend the rest of the film, and all their energies, looking for each other. They have friends and well-wishers who readily believe them and help them out.
Dia has her best friend Tanu (debutante Mohini Shimpi) by her side in times of need. Kenny’s business partner Akash (first-timer Sukkarann Vats) and the latter’s girlfriend and colleague Nubra (Ayesha Adlakha, also a debutante) are his go-to people. But eventually it is their own devices that the duo must rely upon as their “textbook attraction” draws them out of their dreams.
They go high and low, flitting from location to location – a cafe; being the principal one, where a specific “coffee moment” is where Kenny’s dream stops every single time. Kenny is desperate to move beyond that point but is repeatedly stuck in a loop that refuses to complete itself. That does not throw him off. “I am sure she exists,” he intones and keeps searching.
As is pretty obvious, Sweet Dreams isn’t your average boy meets girl love story. But everything else about the film borders on the average although the young people who populate the wafer-thin plot possess winning ways even when they aren’t all that convincing.
If love makes the world go round, Sweet Dreams makes two individuals go round and round in circles. The boy, coming off a messy break-up, has lost his grip on reality. He consults a therapist (Faye D’Souza in a special appearance).
The girl, an aspiring singer-songwriter, admits at one point that “I need to grow up”. She is in a relationship with a restaurateur Ishant Chhetri (Meiyang Chang) who wants to relocate to Canada and open an eatery. They are in love all right but they aren’t kindred spirits.
Kenny is a recycle artist, an unusual profession for a romantic hero who wants to escape the here and now and find solace in his dreams. In the real world, he finds a soulmate in the free-spirited Roop (Sauraseni Maitra) and takes her into confidence about the current state of his mind, confused and fragile.
The line separating believable from baloney, flimsy from fulsome, is precariously thin. It is repeatedly breached as much in the realms of the imagination as in the tangible world that Dia, Kenny and their friends inhabit.
What must be said for the film is that despite the awkward convolutions that are triggered by the constant overlapping of the two worlds. It manages to keep its flights of fancy within a generally manageable bandwidth.
In one sequence – it plays out in a romantic reverie – the girl wishes she could sit by the sea looking at the sunset and pause the moment. Confusing? The girl from Kenny’s dream, and the boy from Dia’s, are confused, too, and unable to tell fact from fantasy.
The roles do not demand much from the actors but to their credit they infuse the characters with palpable charm. Mithila Palkar is especially good as the girl who chases elusive certitudes in a world where everything is in a state of flux.
Amol Parashar provides the perfect foil with his effortless fleshing out of a man whose heart and head work at cross-purposes. Sauraseni Maitra makes her supporting role count for much more than the footage apportioned to it.
Is Sweet Dreams more than the sum of its parts? Not really, but its air of sustained light-heartedness ensures that it is taken for what it is – a frothy yet genteel take on the dynamics of love, dating and telepathy. It does not flow like a dream but does frequently find the beat it is looking for.
