The first thing you see in the new movie Dreams, from the Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, is a freight truck parked in the middle of nowhere. Inside the truck are several migrants, who are making the perilous journey from Mexico to the U.S.
Franco is vague on specifics; he observes and implies more than he explains. One of the migrants is a young man named Fernando, played by Isaac Hernández, and he quickly separates himself from the others and makes his way toward San Francisco. There's determination as well as exhaustion in Fernando's stride, almost as if he knows exactly where he's going.
He does. Fernando heads to a swanky apartment, the home of a philanthropist named Jennifer McCarthy, played by Jessica Chastain. Jennifer is surprised to see him, but they're clearly not strangers: They immediately fall into bed, in the first of the movie's many explicit sex scenes.
The backstory comes together gradually. Fernando studied at a Mexico City dance academy that receives funding from Jennifer's arts foundation. Their torrid affair began some time ago, during one of Jennifer's many trips to Mexico. Now Fernando has entered the U.S. illegally to be with her, and he's determined to stay, and perhaps even launch his dance career.
Dreams first screened at the Berlin International Film Festival last February, less than a month into the second Trump presidency. Although there are references to ICE and the looming threat that Fernando could be arrested and deported, immigration provides the context rather than the subject of the movie. What interests Franco the most is the ever-shifting balance of power between Fernando, an undocumented immigrant trying to make ends meet as a bartender, and Jennifer, a privileged older white woman who travels by private jet.
It's a dynamic as complicated as it is toxic. Fernando needs Jennifer's support, but only up to a point; he's a talented enough dancer to make inroads with a prestigious San Francisco ballet company. Jennifer's desire for Fernando verges on an obsession, but one that she indulges only on her terms. Things were so much more convenient for her when she could see Fernando down in Mexico, away from the prying eyes and sharp judgments of her family members and colleagues.
Chastain also starred in Franco's previous film, Memory, playing a sexual-abuse survivor drawn into a relationship with a man with early-onset dementia, played by Peter Sarsgaard. The setup was tortured, but the actors were good enough to make you believe it.
In a way, Dreams plays like a cruel B-side to Memory's more optimistic romance, and Chastain, so sympathetic in the earlier film, here swaps virtue for outright villainy. She's long been one of our most fearless actors, and she gives herself over, chillingly, to the role of Jennifer, a monstrous manipulator and exploiter of someone she claims to love.
Franco's films, including the class-uprising thriller New Order, do not exactly overflow with the milk of human kindness. He's often struck his critics, myself included, as something of a junior-league Michael Haneke, hurling contempt at his characters, especially the rich ones, from a cold, clinical distance.
With Dreams, an ironic title if ever there was one, he's in predictably cynical terrain. Here, he targets the racism and hypocrisy of liberal do-gooders like Jennifer, and his point is as inarguable as his methods are obvious. This is the kind of movie where Jennifer's smarmy brother, well played by Rupert Friend, will make crass comments about Mexicans, utterly oblivious to the Latina cleaner quietly tidying up the office around him.
After a season of high-minded movies about the redemptive power of art, there's something bracing about Franco's ruthlessly unsentimental view of the ecosystem in which artists and their benefactors operate.
I rolled my eyes at that scene, recoiling, not for the first time, from Franco's posture of smug superiority. But not all of Dreams is so easy to shake off. After a season of high-minded movies about the redemptive power of art, there's something bracing about Franco's ruthlessly unsentimental view of the ecosystem in which artists and their benefactors operate.
Not even Fernando's extraordinary talent is ultimately enough to make his dreams come true. Hernández is a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre, and the film's most pleasurable scenes are those in which we see Fernando dancing — fleeting moments of beauty in a film with a relentlessly ugly vision of the world.
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