Mexican writer/director Michel Franco explores the dynamics of money, class and crossing the border through the spiky, unsettling erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican ballet dancer and actor.
In the languidly paced “Dreams,” Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment with wielding the power at their fingertips against their lover. The film examines the push-pull of attraction and rejection on a scope both intimate and global, finding the uneasy space where the two meet.
Chastain stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco does not center her experience, but that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we meet first, escaping from the back of a box truck filled with migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, and abandoned in San Antonio on a 100-degree day.
His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is the lap of luxury, a modernist San Francisco mansion where he makes himself at home, and where he’s clearly been at home before. A talented ballet dancer who has already once been deported, he’s risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, though as a high-profile figure who works with her father and brother (Rupert Friend), she’d rather keep her affair with Fernando under wraps.
He’s her dirty little secret, but he’s also a human being who refuses to be kept in the shadows.
As Jennifer and Fernando attempt to navigate what it looks like for them to be together, it seems that larger forces will shatter their connection. In reality, the only real danger is each other.
The storytelling logic of “Dreams” is predicated on watching these characters move through space, the way we watch dancers do. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose the wildly varying experiences of Fernando and Jennifer — he enters the States in a box truck, almost dying of thirst and heat stroke; she arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but they both enter empty homes alone, melancholy.
During a rift in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel while working at a bar, drinking red wine out of plastic cups with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer’s calls, while she eats alone in her darkened dining room, drinking red wine out of crystal.
