Dreams renders risky, incoherent nightmares from secret affairs and ballet dancers
Courtesy Greenwich Entertainment
The unconscious mind could come up with better pastimes than this.
Into the reality of a rich man’s world, Michel Franco assembles lovers from affluent socialite Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and Mexican ballet dancer Fernando (Isaac Hernández). Combining power dynamics, they could rise together. No? No. Let’s have them topple each other.
Franco claims “an audience should never feel safe watching a movie,” but he tactlessly pulls from abuse he hasn’t experienced for the senseless purpose of manufacturing unease. Dreams strike the surface of reconstructing stereotypical tropes but fail to deliver a meaningful blaze.
The film’s smatterings of steamy sex scenes do not warrant a titillating advertised whole. They exist as smoke screens to entice viewers into a played-up erotic film with a Big Name Star. Important discussions of womanhood and immigration fall by the wayside. This is not the film we need in today’s hellscape—maybe ever.
I wish I could scrub my eyes clean.
Gender stereotypes initially reverse as the mature Jennifer romances a younger Fernando. I love to see it. The dynamic is sticky, though—Fernando is a student of Jennifer’s do-good philanthropy ballet school in Mexico created as a wing of her father’s foundation.
So when Fernando crosses the border to surprise Jennifer and permanently live with her in San Francisco and she continues to keep their relationship under wraps, he feels slighted and leaves her.
From the opening scene of an abandoned semi-truck holding immigrating Mexicans in sweltering heat to an actual depiction of the border later—calm, and opposing the dangerous rhetoric often used to describe it—this is the closest some people will get to an empathetic and fleshed-out immigrant experience in the media.
Franco wittily comments on the ignorance of Americans as those deported to Mexico’s border are asked if they reside in Mexico. One man is actually Honduran and another is El Salvadorian.
Franco presents his nationality in the background scenes. An immigrant woman silently enters the foreground to pick up the orange peels Jennifer haphazardly leaves on the desk. Fernando finds work in a motel alongside other immigrants when he leaves Jennifer. When he is noticed by a ballet company owner dancing outside the ballet for a free ticket and subsequently offered the lead role in the next production, he receives racist comments from a male member of the company. A man he speaks with after at a bar says, “We cross the border, we wipe their asses, and they’re fine with that. But you take a job from one of them and they kick you to the curb.”
Fernando doesn’t seem to be in this country to pursue dance, and still, the opportunity unfolds. He initially emigrates for love—or at least the semblance of it. Yet Jennifer and Fernando’s chemistry is not palpable beyond the few sex scenes they share.
Their relationship, as with all other examined tropes, competes for screen time with Jessica Chastain.
This is director-writer-producer and editor Franco’s second film with Chastain, with more in the works. The way he presents her waltzes an uncomfortable line between muse and obsession. Most cuts overwhelmingly depict her flawless image.
Yet as her image reigns supreme, Franco subtly undermines her character’s depth. Her lack of assertiveness in personal decisions and her overall demeanor demean her. Jennifer is a solitary woman pressed against the glass ceiling of her father’s foundation. It must have been important for Franco to comment on her inability to bear children—a point she brings against her father’s criticism of her relationship, as if any reason needs to be given.
Where Franco initially posits promising new dynamics, tropes continue to pound the same road. This remains the woman’s experience as we’ve always known it.
Between Jennifer’s opulent outfits that do more for her character than the script and lackluster settings that don’t build an immersive world, Franco creates an arthouse take that falls flat.
Fans of Franco’s films may argue the scoured background is the impetus: that’s his classic nihilism theme at play. But when nihilism unfolds into gratuitous abuse solely to incite ill ease, that’s misappropriation entirely.
I was left feeling small and confused as prior stimulating scenes of their love twist into forced ugliness. Franco draws on abuse from outside his scope to senselessly render a sickness in the viewer, compounding for those who have experienced the same trauma firsthand. It presents without warning. Any previous narrative warps in the resulting shock.
We don’t necessarily need warm comfort films in today’s heady climate but we certainly don’t need this. To depict abuse with no underwritten purpose is wanton sadism. It’s Jennifer’s image we see last, shaken and numb. I was left grappling with the sudden descent into a nightmare I wish I could unsee.
