If for nothing else, Michel Franco’s wan and repetitive new effort gives us a crystalline definition for “victim of one’s own success.” For there is really no way to separate the deflation that sets in early in “Dreams” from the surprise that so agreeably built throughout his prior entry, “Memory.”
That earlier, Venice-acclaimed film shocked by threading a bleak narrative with glimmers of hope; this latest, Berlin-launched title lulls by offering little more than notes on a theme, tracing the contours of privilege and power so single-mindedly that the film ends up spinning in circles.
That both star Jessica Chastain — and that both were apparently filmed near back-to-back — certainly encourages the comparison.
Here, Chastain stars as Jennifer, a Bay Area heiress who spends her days half-heartedly running her father’s philanthropic organization, and who might have otherwise been named Karen had the filmmaker not deigned for subtlety. Not that Franco pulls many punches, opening his film with a title card ironically superimposed on a trailer truck full of undocumented migrants whose ad hoc border-crossing will forever limit their own American dreams.
Among those migrants is young Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a Mexico City-born dance prodigy turned kept-man in Jennifer’s gilded prison. Once the narrative picks up, our Fernando has made a fraught border crossing in his first of many attempts to rebalance his situationship on more equitable terms. Several more will follow, each growing in audacity.
Thank heavens for that shock value, which (eventually) lends urgency and unpredictability to a narrative that otherwise plays like Hot Wheels racing down a closed circuit. As we quickly learn, the star-crossed duo are brought together by a voracious and shared appetite, and cast apart by, you know, everything else that divides an undocumented migrant from a white woman of influence and affluence.
You also know the drill: At first, Jennifer and Fernando try for a shared life on her San Francisco turf, but her refusal to learn Spanish coupled with his limited social standing – not to mention his liability to an ICE raid – create a foundation upon which no healthy relationship can be built. Of course, theirs was already not a healthy relationship even before the narrative kicks off, leading Fernando to break free of his Mexico City cage with that clandestine border crossing. And so we go, cycle rinse repeat, ever learning the same set of lessons once this clearly sexually compatible couple allow their games of power exchange to follow them outside the bedroom.
If no doubt authentic, such unwavering social determinism also leaves “Dreams” with little room to maneuver, often encouraging comparisons to more richly textured explorations of this subject. Like Daniel Craig in “Queer,” Chastain’s Jessica soon learns that no amount of money can buy a man who doesn’t want to be kept; like Vicky Krieps in “Phantom Thread,” Hernández’s Fernando goes to extreme and near-kamikaze lengths to rebalance the scale of his arrangement. And to his severest credit, Franco fulfills the unmet promise of “Babygirl,” wringing this already challenging dynamic for maximum discomfort.
Likewise, the filmmaker also wrings a pair of physically and emotionally committed performances from his two leads. Chastain and Hernández show little vanity (and much of everything else) as they embody unbridled attraction in long, clinical takes, while the real-life dancer Hernández gets to strut his stuff in recital scenes that inform his character’s immigrant optimism that he too can make it if he just brings his best.
Only with Franco’s hermetically sealed morality accenting this foolhardy confidence right from the get-go, the film asks for little more than patience as you run the motions, awaiting a third-act escalation that comes welcome, if too little too late.
Shot in 2023, “Dreams” obviously carries a different resonance under the current light – but here too does the film pale to the present tense. For all its extreme touches, then film ultimately falls back to a social read not terribly dissimilar to that of “The Great Gatsby,” this year celebrating its 100th anniversary. Without much by way of variance, the film spins on and spins out, jumping from austere interiors in Mexico City to San Francisco and back again, putting forward a cogent political read that does little to flatter those looking for anything more.
For that, I suppose, we’ll always have our “Memory.”
