Director: Michel Franco
Writer: Michel Franco
Stars: Isaac Hernandez, Jessica Chastain, Eduardo Gonzalez
Synopsis: Romance blossoms between a wealthy socialite and a Mexican ballet dancer, intertwining their contrasting lives and cultures.
Mexican director Michel Franco is known for his unsparing vision into the selfishness of humans. In his latest effort, starring Jessica Chastain (in a far less sympathetic role than he placed her in Memory), Franco turns his eye to the world of performative philanthropy. The McCarthy family are part of San Francisco’s elite. How they made their money isn’t relevant, but how they “art wash” it is. The McCarthy Foundation, managed by Jennifer (Chastain) and Jake (Rupert Friend), the adult children of arts patron Michael (Marshall Bell), doles out major sums to galleries, education programs, cultural institutions, and extends those contributions over the border to Mexico on occasion. It was in Mexico where Jennifer met and began a passionate affair with Fernando (Isaac Hernandez), a talented ballet dancer and teacher who was deported from America over a decade ago for the minor offense of busking.
The film begins in a nightmarish manner where undocumented immigrants are left in the back of a truck dying from heat. It switches to night when ‘coyotes’ open the doors of a truck roughly pulling those who made the border crossing out. Fernando is in that group and in the confusion, he walks into the night. His goal is to get to San Francisco and Jennifer. It’s a punishing journey but he makes it. Jennifer is seemingly pleased to find her lover in her bedroom in her tasteful but personality-vacant home. She is concerned, however, that he undertook a dangerous and illegal route to be there.
As their San Francisco relationship develops, Fernando notes Jennifer’s habit of sidelining him in public which comes to a head when they’re on a weekend getaway and Jennifer sees a friend of her father’s booking in to the lodge where they are staying. She demands that they immediately pack up and leave. Fernando is left with no doubt that, as much as Jennifer says she loves him, she’s not prepared to present an undocumented Mexican as her lover to the inner circle. A secret dalliance is as much as he will be — and being an invisible secret means he’s not only a rich woman’s fetish, but he’s also not going to be able to follow his own aspirations. He leaves her, something she finds unacceptable, and faces America without a wealthy safety net to ensure his survival. And yet, he survives and flourishes without her.
Franco’s film wants to be too many things. A tale of thwarted obsession with Jennifer using every resource she can to track down Fernando. A biting look at self-congratulatory “philanthropy” — with every donation heralding Michael and his family as not only taste makers but dream makers for the disadvantaged. It barely registers for Jennifer that her Louis Vuitton luggage alone could pay her house cleaner’s wage in her expensive Mexico City apartment. Actual money means nothing to her family as it is always going to be there to spend. The status the money offers, however, is something Jennifer has spent her entire life devoted to. Franco doesn’t bother to tell the audience what it is that Fernando does until a significant amount of time into the film. The fact that he’s a prodigiously talented dancer, talented enough that he finds his own way into The San Francisco Ballet, seems secondary. The fact that he’s Mexican always comes first and the fact that the McCarthy family has the resources to make or break him is not lost on him nor the audience.
The film takes a decidedly dark turn in the third act which in part over-illustrates Franco’s point and then later through an unnecessary depiction of sexual assault works to unravel the film and condemn it to that moment. Fernando has, until that point, been used abominably by Jennifer (who perhaps honestly has no idea how not to behave with extreme entitlement), but the empathy that’s been garnered for a man who genuinely wants to be able to fulfil the promise of his talents on the largest stage available dissipates.
It has been noted that Franco is a cold and somewhat clinical director. He’s uninterested in creating comfortable scenarios or characters. The main diversion from his style was in the humanity of 2023’s Memory which still featured compromised and morally ambiguous characters. However, the iciness of Dreams is a distinct impediment to the sections of the film that are supposed to burn with passion. Jessica Chastain’s Jennifer is, for the most part, a beautiful creation of someone else’s making — whether that be her perfect designer wardrobe or her carefully controlled public persona. The fact that she likes dirty talk with her sweat-soaked secret lover isn’t so much a personality trait as it is an expected deviance for the ultra-wealthy.
Vacillating between too obvious and too ugly, Dreams tangles itself into a psychodrama played out between the vampiric rich and the talented “unfortunates” with neither being interesting enough to want to spend time with. The major disappointment is that in the bones of the film is a compelling phenomenon to investigate that get lost in an enervated melodrama.
