“Before, Now & Then” is a dreamy Indonesian drama about changing expectations and ideas of “freedom” that pass through the life of a Muslim woman through twenty years of her life.

This Berlin Film Festival award winner is a period piece based on the true story of the life of a Javanese woman from the WWII 1940s into the Indonesia of the 1960s, but taken from a chapter of a novel dealing with her life.

We meet Nana (Happy Salma) on the run with her older sister Ningsi (Rieke Diah Pitaloka).

They are fleeing “these men who took your husband” (in Indonesian with English subtitles). Nana is carrying her baby, anxious to know what will become of her. The men pursuing them (imagined by Nana) “are not Japanese or Dutch.” They are Indonesian rebels fond of behading their foes, and “They want to marry you to their leader.”

Nana sees visions of her man, and still sees him in her dreams 15 years later. She has been remarried, we figure, to that “leader,” Mr. Darga (Arswendy Bening Swara). She has a baby, two daughters and a little boy and a life of a West Java plantation with him. And she still cannot forget the husband she lost.

Over a decade into her marriage, her dreams are one problem, her wandering second husband another. Her doted-on little girl Dais (Chempa Puteri) is often taken along on Daddy’s trips from their plantation to town. There’s another woman, Miss Oni (Laura Basuki). “She has cows,” the innocent child tells her.

Nana has life lessons for little Dais. “A woman must keep her secrets.” And she has advice for herself in coping with this new mistress situation. “I must be like water, adapt to the environment.”

But when the mistress moves in, their chilly relationship warms as each notes the nature of women in their world at this period in time, just when Indonesia was losing one government, with whispers of “communists” all around, and the dictator Suharto replaced the revolutionary, democratic but eventually dictatorial Sukarno.

The only “joke” in this quiet and moody picture has townsfolk remarking on the simularity of their Dear Leaders’ names, a shrug about how nothing changes for people like them.

“Before, Now & Then” — which has the “triangle structure and dynamic of “The Color Purple” without the violence or same sex relationship — has the two discuss their fates and relative helplessness to change them, women in a patriarchal culture ruled by military dictatorships.

One longs for not living under the female “pressure to be perfect,” to have a chance at “running a business without men.” Nana makes suggestions on how to improve the plantation’s (unnamed) business, which the quite but hardly passive Mr. Darga ignores. Ino longs for a day when women like them aren’t “unestimated” and “judged” by men and their female peers.

Writer-director Kamila Andin has surprises to serve up, but keeps everything quiet and even-tempered. That “need to be perfect” has Nana tying up Dais to keep the pre-tween from interrupting a party she’s throwing for The Boss, her husband. Nobody seems shocked when the child rolls into the living room in an attempt to free herself.

And when Nana’s first husband re-enters the picture, years later, there’s no shouting, no recriminations about “cheating” from her already-cheating second husband. Just a mild-mannered negotiation and family debate over her “freedom,” the children of the marriage, etc.

Andin uses dreams to give away Nana’s real state of mind and music to underscore the slow pace of change for these women — a forlorn fiddle in early scenes, tinny pop on the radio or 78rpm records later, a string quartet with singer in the latter acts.

There isn’t a lot on the surface here, and the chaste nature of the romance (perfumed notes) and refusal of anybody to lose their cool over anything — Ino’s simple “I’m sorry” to Nana is all that’s said about this “arrangement.”– keeps the drama on a low simmer throughout.

The performances reflect that, with Salma an exemplar in suggesting a fiery interior life that must be hidden, like Nana’s “secrets,” from view.

But “Before, Now & Then” is still a lovely meditation on patience, the glacial pace of true cultural change and a woman’s lot in much of the world, with many never daring to think of their happiness and freedom as anything more than a dream.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Happy Salma, Laura Basuki, Arswendy Bening Swara, Chempa Puteri and Rieke Diah Pitaloka

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kamila Andin, based on a novel by Ahda Imran. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:43