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No one is going to accuse Mexican director Michel Franco of subtlety. In his crudely effective new drama Dreams, which premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, he deals in sledgehammer fashion with race, sex and class in contemporary America. It’s a timely movie that feels especially relevant in the early days of the second Trump administration. At certain moments, it also has that seamy intensity that you find in Tennessee Williams plays about destructive relationships between characters of different ages and from vastly different social backgrounds. Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.
Hernández plays Fernando, a young Mexican illegal immigrant. He has just come back over the border hidden with other undocumented Mexicans in the back of a huge lorry. Early on, we see him walking in the baking heat, a hobo seemingly without money or prospects but still with a swaggering self-confidence. He’s making his way to San Francisco. Once he gets there, we realise he has been to the city before. He makes his way to the luxurious apartment of socialite Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain), and soon they’re having very vigorous sex. Fernando is a talented ballet dancer and she is his patron. She runs a foundation in Mexico, which is how she knows him.
Jennifer comes from one of those immensely wealthy American families who give lavishly to the arts and like to see themselves as liberals but get very uncomfortable when outsiders encroach too far into their world of privilege and luxury. We are aware from the outset of the huge social chasm between her and her lover. She is older, richer and has a different colour of skin.
Franco explores the dynamics between the couple in intriguing fashion. She is sexually obsessed with him. He’s her very own handsome, sweaty Stanley Kowalski type, but she herself has none of the emotional fragility of a Blanche DuBois. Instead, she is ruthless and highly manipulative. When he tries to get out of her grasp and build his own life, she reins him back in. She pampers him, buys him clothes and gifts, but still refuses him what he most desires – to be treated as her equal.
One of the most resonant scenes in the film is also one of the quietest. It’s a moment in an expensive restaurant, in which Fernando starts speaking in Spanish to the waiter and Jennifer, who likes to be in charge of everything, is furious to be left out of the conversation.
Jennifer’s brother (Rupert Friend) and father (Marshall Bell) don’t hide their disdain for this new interloper in their world. They simply can’t accept someone they normally expect to see in a service capacity sharing Jennifer’s apartment and, even worse, her bed.
Everything here is done at full throttle. Even the dance sequences are souped-up. At the local conservatory, where he has been earmarked as a future star, Fernando is shown performing a “Black Swan” routine that seems to mimic his own turbulent relationship with Jennifer.
Chastain’s performance ranks with her other similar powerhouse turns in films including Molly’s Game and Miss Sloane. She excels in playing formidable, strong-willed characters like this; women prepared to do everything they can to get what they want. Hernández is convincing too as the ambitious young Mexican whose talent and good looks ultimately aren’t enough to crack open American society for him.
In the latter part of the film, the power balance suddenly shifts. The film seems to be re-framing itself as a study of toxic masculinity rather than as a drama about the casual mistreatment of immigrants. Fernando begins to assert himself, and treats Jennifer with aggression and cruelty. The story then cranks up even further toward its predictably brutal ending. Many in the audience at the Berlin press screening turned their eyes away at a final flourish which, like the movie as a whole, just seems far too obvious and overwrought.
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Dir: Michel Franco. Starring: Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández, Rupert Friend, Marshall Bell. 100 mins.
‘Dreams’ is a world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, and will be released in UK cinemas later in the year
