Mexican screenwriter and director Michel Franco (“Memoria”) explores the dynamics of money, social class and the border through the disturbing and spiky erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican dancer and actor.
In the languidly paced film, Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment by wielding the power at their fingertips against each other. The film examines the push and pull of attraction and rejection in a realm that is both intimate and global, finding the uncomfortable space where both meet.
Chastain plays Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco focuses not on his experience, but on that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we first meet escaping from the back of a truck full of immigrants crossing the border between the United States and Mexico. It's abandoned in San Antonio on a 100 degree day.
His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is luxury: a modernist San Francisco mansion where he feels at home and where he has clearly been before. A talented ballet dancer who was already deported once, risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, although, as a high-profile figure, she prefers to keep her romance with Fernando a secret. He is her dirty little secret, but he is also a human being who refuses to stay in the shadows.
As Jennifer and Fernando try to understand what it will be like for them to be together, it seems that greater forces will break their connection. In reality, the only real danger is from each other.
The narrative logic of “Dreams” is based on seeing these characters move through space, as we see dancers. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose Fernando and Jennifer's wildly different experiences: he nearly dies of thirst and heat stroke; She arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but they both enter alone, melancholy, into empty houses. During a breakup in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel, drinking red wine from plastic glasses with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer's calls, while she eats alone in her dark dining room, drinking crystal glasses.
These comparisons aren't exactly nuanced, but they're stark, and for most of the film Franco simply asks us to watch them move together and apart, in a strange, elusive pas de deux. Often overshadowed by the architecture, their distinctive bodies in space are more important than the sparse dialogue that only serves to fill crucial gaps in the narrative.
Cinematographer Yves Cape captures it all in sharp, saturated images. The lack of a musical score (beyond the diegetic music in the ballet scenes) contributes to the dry, flat tone and affect, as these characters enact increasing cruelties, both emotional and physical, on each other as a way of trying to contain each other, until it becomes something truly dark and disturbing.
Franco loses the plot of “Sueños” in the third act. What is a fairly serious drama about the weight of social expectations on a relationship turns into a dramatically unexpected game of revenge as Jennifer and Fernando cling to whatever power they have over each other. She fetishizes him and he returns the favor, violently.
Ultimately, Franco ditches his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling disgusting. These events are not enlightening and, rather, feel like a grim betrayal. The circumstances of the story may be timely, but “Dreams” doesn't help us better understand the situation, leaving us in the dark about what we're supposed to get out of this story of sex, violence, money and freedom. We already know everything it suggests.
Katie Walsh is a film critic for the Tribune News Service.
'Dreams'
In English and Spanish, with subtitles.
Not classified
Execution time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Playing: It premieres on Friday, February 27 in limited release.
