Two years ago, Michel Franco released easily my favourite film of his, the Jessica Chastain-starring Memory, which absolutely knocked me out. By no small coincidence, Memory was also, despite its heinously traumatic subject matter, Franco’s most soft-edged film, filled with a hope and empathy that his previous work lacked. Now, he’s reunited with Chastain for Dreams, and those edges have been sharpened back to lethal points, resulting in a film that does have more to say than Memory, and a far more biting way to say it, but is so drenched in its own poison that it’s impossible to get close to.
This time out, Chastain plays Jennifer, an heiress in an incredibly rich family who is, alongside her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) in charge of her father’s foundations for art endowments. It’s through this work that she met her much younger boyfriend Fernando (Isaac Hernandez), a Mexican ballet dancer without documentation who hops back and forth over the American border to be with Jennifer, sometimes using her cash to fund his dangerous and illegal trips. It’s a relationship that initially seems to be built entirely on raw lust (the sex scenes and dirty talk are wildly explicit), until Jennifer hurt’s Fernando’s feelings by hiding him from a peer, causing him to break up with her and her to go on an obsessive quest to win him back.
Dreams’s core problem is that both of these characters, as well performed as they are, are pretty hard to actually believe as people, their relationship with one another less wild and animalistic than actually just kind of stupid. Chastain and Hernandez (who is an actual ballet dancer and gets plenty of opportunities to prove his impressive dance skills) have plenty of chemistry, but I rarely bought into the decision-making process of either of them.
As pawns in Franco’s morality play about white Americans’ relationship with Mexican immigrant labourers, though, they make more sense. All of Dreams is about this power differential and the ‘acceptable’ ways for migrants to make a living, Fernando’s sex with Jennifer just as much part of his professional obligations as actually dancing is. Franco gets even thornier than this though, his portrayal of the US border crossings themselves refusing to conform to conventional Hollywood wisdom. These migrants aren’t cartel narcoterrorists, but nor are they innocent families fleeing persecution – they’re simply aiming to make money, and if a cycle of deportation and getting smuggled back in is the price to pay for that, so be it. He’s not concerned with moralising this process (though a fascinating little interlude about the mistreatment of non-Mexican deportees back in Mexico has a plaintive charge), simply in the drive and will of those who do it.
Dreams is Franco back in his clever and nasty mode, and while I can’t say that’s the mode I’m most fond of, this is a sharp example of it. Consistently provocative, both politically and sexually (Chastain gets a monologue here about sucking balls that I’m sure will infuriate most viewers), it’s less a dream, more one of those anxious nightmares that leave you a little bit ashamed in those first seconds after you wake up.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 