Michael Franco’s Dreams is a sobering statement on power and exploitation, masquerading as a love affair between an affluent American and a Mexican ballet prodigy locked in a game of escalating stakes. Jessica Chastain, in a bold performance, is a calculating San Franciscan arts patron whose near-pathological infatuation with a gifted young immigrant dancer delivers a scathing critique of what lurks beneath performative, do-good liberalism. There is little room for interpretation in Franco’s assessment of what fuels white savior-ism or liberal guilt; mileage will vary whether audiences agree with his dark premise or not.
Mexican writer-director Franco, a frequently detached social essayist whose dystopian 2021 New Order imagined a violent coup amidst modern-day Mexico class warfare, followed with 2023’s trauma-fueled love story Memory, also starring Chastain opposite Michael Shannon. Now, in the hard-edged immigrant tale Dreams, Franco eschews PC platitudes in favor of far more cynical conclusions.
The picture opens on a harrowing topicality as a group of smuggled immigrants sits locked in a semi-trailer, blazing in the San Antonio desert. Out of this caravan comes young Fernando Rodriguez (renowned ballet star Isaac Hernandez), who makes his way to San Francisco and into the upscale home of well-heeled philanthropist Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain). While initially the nature of their relationship remains unclear, Fernando nonetheless retrieves a hidden door key and promptly makes himself at home.
Jennifer helms the family foundation with brother Jake (Rupert Friend) and their aged patriarch father Michael (Marshall Bell), a picture of 1% urban elites funneling their vast fortune toward optics-focused progressive advocacy. But after a call from Fernando, she hurries home for steamy sex and Italian take-out. Passionate lovers with age, cultural and obvious financial disparities, they also have radically opposed ideas of their relationship dynamics, setting conflict in motion.
Jennifer lives as high as Fernando lives low, as an undocumented struggling artist previously deported home to Mexico City, where he belongs to the dance company funded by Jennifer’s foundation (how their affair presumably began). Yet despite his modest circumstances (he takes a job working in a low-rent motel and dances on the street for coins), he carries himself with dignity and possesses an extraordinary dance talent, earning a spot in a San Francisco ballet company backed by…you guessed it. Jennifer presses wads of cash on him but keeps their fling out of sight, refusing to present him to her sternly conservative father or social circle of extreme wealth. In other words, she architects a clandestine sexual/monetary coercion of sorts—but in the outside world, like must attract like.
Yet her lusty pull toward Fernando amounts to an above-all priority (which Chastain fully commits to), and when rejected, it curdles into emotional dependency. When Fernando tires of being kept a secret and leaves her early on, she unravels, stopping just short of Alex Forrest. But is her desire actually for an (im)possible future with Fernando, to fuel a self-congratulatory savior complex or in something darker? Franco bets on the latter.
Franco shuttles his picture between Mexico City and San Francisco, Jennifer naturally having high-end homes in both and a private jet for on-a-whim travel. But ironically, she has little interest in cultural immersion—a strong scene finds her on an imposing Mexico visit to Fernando’s disapproving parents, with whom she uses a translation app (presumably she can’t be bothered to learn Spanish). In another, she’s imperiously put out when Fernando speaks Spanish to a restaurant server—a kindred spirit—leaving her odd man out.
As the movie progresses, Franco detaches our empathy as Jennifer’s manipulations—money, sex and full control of Fernando’s livelihood—give the immense Chastain a ruthless, string-pulling dominance to play; it is an unflattering role and brave performance.
In the film’s final corrosive stretches, a shock admission pushes Fernando to what might be called a blunt force response, and Jennifer to a coup de grâce of misanthropic finality. Franco leaves little room for interpretation: white privilege will not truly share parity with those it deems to be underclass, no matter how talented or decent they may be, and when the balance of power is challenged, the cost is steep. That Franco commits so fully to this thesis is the movie’s bitterest pill.
3 stars
Recommended.
