Yearn After Reading

Review by In the Frame participant Neve Dolin

In the Frame is a program that fosters inquiry, reflection, and an appetite for cinema. As part of our In the Frame program, up to four emerging film critics had the opportunity to watch, reflect on and review films in the Perth Festival Lotterywest Films 2025 – 26 season. 

Sometimes it arrives at the exact moment you don’t quite know who you are yet, or when that sense of self feels unsteady. Limerence steps in and is the throttle to the next version of yourself. In that way it doesn’t just attach to someone desirable; it also starts to fabricate a new identity. You start to gather pieces from the people you fixate on, a tone of voice, a way of moving through the world, or a new haircut. You carry them forward with you and by the time you reach the next relationship, you aren’t really starting from nothing. You are made up of a collection of trinket traits, past projections that have settled into something that feels like you. There’s something almost textile about it, like pulling strands from different places and weaving them together.  

In Dreams (Sex, Love) that sense of construction feels so present. Johanne, the protagonist, becomes infatuated with her French teacher Johanna. She writes down every encounter in a novel that she eventually shows her mother and grandmother. We never really know how much of it was true and how much of it was dreamt up, as the act of writing itself is a form of projection. It’s how Johanne builds a version of herself in relation to someone she barely knows, someone she can’t really know. Dreams lives inside the hazy intense cocoon of first infatuations. It is immersive, personal, and at times, overwhelming. It really demonstrates how these feelings can become obsessive and suffocating, and the sense of urgency makes it feel like it has to be real, otherwise why would it feel so big? Why would she be able to climb so high if only to fall back down? Up and up she goes, higher and higher and never wanting to forget any of it. Johanne’s narration makes it unclear how much of what we see actually happened; that blurring is the heart of limerence. Finding patterns where there may be none, stitching together connections from absence, it’s intoxicating and destructive at the same time.

Pillion is quieter, more restrained, more English, but in saying that, it is anything but vanilla. An adaptation of the novel Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-Esteem by Adam Mars - Jones it focuses on the boundaries and mental distance rather than the intensity of yearning from afar. Colin, a shy, barbershop singing, traffic warden, is waiting for something, anything, to happen to his steady, yet dull life. When he falls for the enigmatic biker Ray after a striking encounter in a back alley on Christmas Day, his life accelerates in ways he could never imagine, what a gift. From that moment, Colin’s desire overtakes him and when Ray’s response is tantalisingly minimal it triggers something deep inside Colin. He is sucked into the BDSM world and finds himself in a power dynamic that both confirms what he has always thought about himself and challenges everything he’s ever known. He cooks, he cleans, he sleeps on the floor with a padlock around his neck while Ray holds the key. They grapple physically and emotionally, joy and confusion tangled together, a lifestyle structure that is meant to be based on trust and consent, yet no one really ever asks if it is okay. Could he continue like this though? Sex without tenderness? Partnership without intimacy? Codependency without the warmth? Ultimately, Colin finds himself stuck between a cock and a hard place, torn between the needs of Ray and his own.  

Both of these films show how desire often reflects what we feel we lack. Especially in queer spaces, where identity can feel fluid, formative and uncertain while you’re trying to find where you fit into it all.  It becomes very easy to blur the lines.  

Do I want to be you, or be on you? 

The person who is desired is partially unknowable. In Dreams, Johanna is as much a symbol of possibilities beyond high school as she is a teacher. In Pillion, Ray remains emotionally distant, forcing Colin to chase meaning as much as affection. Everything is filtered through longing, and this desperation is distorting. It’s a distraction to anything else around Colin. But also, Johanna and Ray are just people right? Messy, inconsistent, flawed? They cannot carry the weight of another person’s imagined future, at this point it’s not even unrequited love, it’s just an imbalance of expectations. And still, it’s hard to dismiss. That is what makes Dreams and Pillion so honest. They allow desire to exist in all its intensity before gently revealing its limits. There are no dramatic ruptures. No clean endings. Just a heavy come down from such great heights and a step forward carrying pieces of themselves they didn’t have before. 

Limerence creates momentum; it gives shape to uncertainty and offers direction, even if that direction isn’t sustainable. It feels almost necessary, like a dress rehearsal, a way of trying on different selves, different futures, before you’ve fully settled into your own. You gather pieces as you go, carrying them forward. The risk being that, at what point do you begin to wonder how much of yourself is actually you and how many traits have you merely cherry picked from anyone you’ve ever admired and curated a personality out of? In the end, these kinds of dynamics will teach you more about yourself than the other person. Sure, the jarring cold turkey of rejection might follow you around for a while, but it’ll fade, and you’ll find someone shiny again. 

Sometimes I play a game in the supermarket where I look around and think, if the world was to start ending right now, who would I choose to partner with? If the fluorescent lights went out, (actually that’s a dream, I cannot stand the lighting in shops) the systems crashed and the ice-cream section started to melt all over the floor amongst everything collapsing, who am I choosing to face the apocalypse (and inevitably, restart the human race) with? Try it sometime. You have to choose quickly. You don’t have much time. So what do you look for? A sparkle in someone’s eye? Their choice of milk? How attractive are they wrangling their potatoes into a paper bag? You can build a whole persona in seconds. That instinct, that rapid calculation, the giddiness of potential sits at the core of what we can often mistake for love at first sight. Even if it isn’t love, it still feels significant while you’re in it and it feels like, well everything. And maybe that’s why we keep coming back to it, on screen, in daydreams, as a distraction, in supermarkets, as a drug of choice? If it’s not love and merely chemical, then why not just enjoy the high while it lasts.