Ena Sendijarević's "Sweet Dreams" is a costumed historical drama portraying the downfall of the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia around the year 1900. The film ostensibly focuses on social change (the end of colonialism) and its consequences. It suggests that these consequences are never straightforward, mirroring both the history of the 20th century and the supposedly postcolonial 21st century. The complexity and elusive nature of social change lead the author of "Sweet Dreams" to resort to not realistic or documentary but hallucinatory, fantastic, and dreamlike frames and visual solutions that present the drama of social change more as hallucination than as a historically real action.

From the title of her film, Sendijarević implies the ambiguous significance of "sweet dreams" and dreams in general for understanding her historical spectacle dominated by warm colors, dynamic color contrasts, and lavish set and costume design. The Dutch family, essentially the collective protagonist of the film, lives their colonial dream on a sugar cane plantation. The family's mother, a lover of overly sweetened coffee, commits suicide by allowing herself to be buried and ultimately suffocated by a factory stream of sugar weighing over a ton. Sweet and deadly are closely intertwined in Ena's film, just as closely as dreams and death. This connection is highlighted in a hyperbolic and burlesque manner throughout the film, culminating at its end when family members literally die in their sleep during a nighttime fire ignited by the servant-native Sati.

Thus, dreams, especially the "sweet" and "undisturbed" ones, in Ena Sendijarević's film are established as symbols of social passivity and metaphors for politically ambivalent social change. It is crucial to note that "Sweet Dreams" fundamentally has a well-known narrative about the downfall of a wealthy bourgeois family (whose wealth was gained through crime). This narrative tradition, in literature and film, is usually characterized by high stylization and aestheticization (recall Visconti's films on the topic) that distorts the reality of the historical context in which the process of bourgeois decadence takes place. We observe this kind of stylization in Sendijarević's film, which could be criticized for focusing more on the problems of a crumbling bourgeois family than on colonial injustice. However, the testament of the suddenly deceased plantation owner, Jan, reveals the decision to "return" the plantation to those to whom it truly belongs, specifically Jan's illegitimate son with the servant Sati, Karel. This decision exposes internal tensions and tacit hierarchies of the colonial world that are dangerously called into question and that Jan's legitimate family will defend at all costs. The desperate act of burning the house—in which all fighters for colonial heritage, including Sati herself, find death—should mark the end of the colonial era and a radical break from the collaboration of the colonized with the colonizers. But does that really happen? Or is it again a fantasy and hallucination?

The cinematic technique of dreams, by which the direction is surprisingly guided, reveals the colonial reality in an unexpected way. "Sweet Dreams" abounds in grotesque, surreal, and burlesque scenes aimed at vividly depicting the cruelty of the colonial family, devoid of any empathy for racially and class-different others. It also illustrates the organization of life in ideal isolation from the real conditions of existence (including tropical climate and swarms of mosquitoes), where family members insist on their own, imagined rights and rituals. Is there an awakening from their "sweet" social and historical dream, devoid of any responsibility?

The final scene of "Sweet Dreams" poses a similar question but from a different perspective. In that scene, Karel, whom Sati saved from the fire and placed at the doorstep of the colonial house in flames, sleeps peacefully amid an apocalyptic event in which fire consumes the remnants of one world. Karel doesn't know that he is the rightful heir to a plantation that disappears just as he knows nothing about the nature of colonialism of which he is a hybrid descendant. (In the game, Karel has already—like in play—killed the only representative of the colonized who shows any desire for rebellion and social justice in the film.) In his dream, the young mulatto grows at a fantastic and fantastical speed, sleeping through the moment of his initiation into the leader-mutant of the postcolonial era.

The passive state of the social and political dream hyperbolically extends indefinitely in Karel's character, who "feeds on dreams" and grows from the dream. Nothing suggests Karel's social awakening or facing the fact that the downfall of colonialism may not have happened. In contrast, in the film's conclusion, we witness the birth of a strange new world whose representatives are a mysterious social species, shaped by the powers of economically defeated but still symbolically alive colonialism. It is a world where the unrealized dreams of the 20th century, still being dreamed, and whose bitter fruits make social change in the 21st century so necessary and urgent yet—unattainable.