‘Dreams’ Review: Jessica Chastain Is Chilling in Michel Franco’s Scalding Study of Love and Privilege – Hollywood Reporter
Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterMexican ballet dancer Isaac Hernández co-stars as an undocumented immigrant who pins his bid for permanency in the U.S. on his relationship with a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist.
By
David Rooney
Chief Film Critic
After an uncharacteristic foray into hope and tenderness with his intense 2023 drama, Memory, Michel Franco again teams with Jessica Chastain, this time on a blistering return to harsh reality in Dreams. Co-starring with charismatic Mexican ballet dancer Isaac Hernández, Chastain is by turns desperate and icy in a conflicted love story that finds nerve-jangling ways to keep shifting the power balance. With his trademark narrative economy, the writer-director elides any trace of superfluous exposition, briskly establishing what’s at stake for both of his main characters and then continually turning the screws to up those stakes.
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Dreams
The Bottom Line
A torrid pas de deux that leaves scars.
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)Cast: Jessica Chastain, Isaac Hernández, Rupert Friend, Marshall Bell, Eligio Meléndez, Mercedes HernándezDirector-screenwriter: Michel Franco
1 hour 37 minutes
An arresting opening sequence shows a truck seemingly abandoned in the middle of nowhere, the vehicle shaking from the force of people locked inside on its cargo bed, screaming to get out. Their cries convey extreme trauma, heightened by the fact that we can only hear and not see the human suffering. When the camera finally does shift to the point of view of those inside the darkened compartment, the doors are flung open and the occupants roughly ushered out into blinding sunlight.
Fernando (Hernández) staggers off through desert scrub without looking back, gasping as he reaches a diner and chugs down a pitcher of water before a nervous Mexican waitress shoos him out. The server’s instant grasp of his situation is evident when she later picks him up on the road and takes him to her home to feed him. With almost nothing except the clothes on his back, he hitchhikes north to San Francisco, the entire set-up unfolding with minimal dialogue.
When Fernando arrives at a duplex in an upscale neighborhood overlooking the city, he knows where to find the hidden key, lets himself in and helps himself to what’s in the refrigerator. The owner, Jennifer (Chastain), comes home to find him naked and asleep in her bed. Unfazed, she undresses and climbs in for some mutually hungry sex, making it obvious theirs is an established relationship.
We never learn exactly how long they have been involved but it emerges in fragments that Jennifer is most comfortable with the arrangement when she’s calling the shots, which was not the case with Fernando’s decision to enter the U.S. illegally.
She works with her brother Jake (Rupert Friend, playing smug and brittle to perfection) and father Michael (Marshall Bell, the picture of patrician authority) at the wealthy family’s philanthropic arts and cultural foundation, making support of a dance academy in Mexico City her pet project. As part of a program to help less fortunate communities, Jennifer is also overseeing the conversion of a San Francisco space to function as a ballet studio for underprivileged kids.
When Fernando starts to chafe at the way Jennifer seems ashamed to be seen with him, keeping him in hiding, he takes off on his own, finds a cleaning job at a motel and tells her to stop calling him.
Believing he’s returned to Mexico City, Jennifer flies there on the family’s private plane, telling unconvinced Jake that she’s going to check out the academy and re-installing herself in their luxury gated home. Chastain excels at portraying a woman accustomed to getting whatever she wants. In a memory stirred up by the kitchen counter, she spells out what it is in that moment in graphic sexual detail. But when Fernando has his own ideas, she’s sufficiently hooked to go with the flow.
Fernando hasn’t been seen at the academy in weeks, and in an uncomfortable encounter using Google Translate, his parents (Eligio Meléndez and Mercedes Hernández) tell her they believe he’s still in San Francisco. The terse words of Fernando’s mother, however, go untranslated: “Tell her to leave him alone and date someone her own age.” Back in the U.S., Jennifer hires a private investigator to track him down.
Franco’s story could easily have been the skeleton for a lurid erotic thriller about a possessive rich American woman claiming ownership of a Mexican boy toy a decade or more younger than her. But the director and his actors play it with neither sensationalism nor melodrama. Instead, it’s a laser-focused study of the shifting calibrations in an uneven power dynamic, in which Jennifer is unwilling to concede the upper hand, ultimately becoming ruthless when the tables are turned.
When Fernando’s talent gets him a foot in the door at the prestigious San Francisco Ballet without her help, she’s rankled. Though not so much that she doesn’t resume the relationship and set him up as a teacher at the new studio. The desire between them is palpable when he returns to her home and is welcomed back with a steamy session on the stairs. But when first Jake and then her father figure out what’s going on, Jennifer takes steps to protect her position in both the family and the well-heeled arts community.
The strict boundaries put in place by wealthy benefactors are evident in Michael’s cautionary chat with his daughter, carefully worded to address what he views as a distasteful situation: “I’m happy that you help immigrants. But there are limits. You know what I’m trying to say.”
Dramatic events abruptly end Fernando’s ascent at SFB, landing him back in Mexico City, where a still intoxicated Jennifer soon follows. But the harmony between them is broken, notably after an eye-opening revelation that prompts Fernando to take drastic steps. That in turn leads to decisive retaliation from Jennifer, who does not respond well to humiliation.
The escalating tension of that final act is as shocking and violent and viciously cold as anything in Franco’s filmography, which has seldom shied away from stark depictions of human cruelty — whether intimate in scale, like After Lucia, or encompassing explosive societal conflict, like New Order.
As terrific as Chastain was in Memory, she’s arguably even better here playing a manipulative woman whose passion for Fernando is genuine — unbridled on the physical side and probably even sincere on a deeper emotional level, albeit with guardrails in place. It’s easy to see why the actress was eager to work with Franco again.
She makes Jennifer’s impulsive final decision as startling as an execution sentence, though it strikes a blow that will cause more lasting pain. Her cut-glass cheekbones could draw blood. As an embodiment of a white person cushioned by money and privilege putting an upstart in his place, she’s chilling, even if she’s clearly also hurting herself.
Hernández, who started ballet training at age eight and has performed some of the most famous classical roles, this year became a principal dancer at American Ballet Theater in New York. He took his first steps into acting only a few years ago but he’s a real find, showing maturity and depth of character, and measuring up to Chastain at every step. We feel for Fernando, a gifted young man who has everything on the line, whereas almost anything for Jennifer can be resolved by writing a check or passing down a directive.
Working with regular cinematographer Yves Cape and as always without a score, Franco allows nothing to distract from his actors, observing their characters’ behavior with a forensic detail both transfixing and disturbing.Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySign up for THR news straight to your inbox every daySubscribe for full access to The Hollywood ReporterSend us a tip using our anonymous form.
