Dreams: A Haunting Tale of Love, Borders, and Inequality
"Dreams" bursts onto the screen as an urgent necessity. If the film could have been written and shot in just three or four months, Mexican director Michel Franco would have to be considered a genius of opportunism, arriving just in time for the election of the new US president and his anti-immigration decrees. But since filmmaking takes several times longer, we are not dealing with calculation, but with an improbably accurate intuition.
By combining a love story with a harsh political satire about capitalism (the humor here is so black that it ceases to be funny), the director hits the bull's-eye of the moment with a single shot.
"Dreams" begins with a static shot: in the middle of the highway, a truck stands motionless. As night falls, screams begin to be heard from inside, where people are trapped without air or water. When the back is opened, a young Mexican man falls out and, on wobbly legs, walks through the desert toward the distant lights of the nearest town. This is the film's protagonist, Fernando. He is heading to San Francisco.
Reaching a luxurious house in a prosperous neighborhood, he habitually takes the key from under the mat, opens the door, enters the bedroom, undresses, and lies down in bed. His beloved lives here, for whose sake he illegally crossed the border: Jennifer is the youngest daughter of a Californian tycoon and philanthropist, a patron of the arts, who oversees, among other things, a dance academy in Mexico City. It was there that she met Fernando, a talented dancer with a great future.
Fernando and Jennifer are clearly happy together, they are easy and comfortable with each other – in bed and beyond. The nuance is that he cannot be seen by outsiders. Firstly, Jennifer fears, not without reason, that her choice will not be approved by her old-fashioned father and a bandit-like brother who, unlike her, is successfully married and the father of two children. Secondly, Fernando can be deported at any moment, and the viewer realizes from the first minutes of the film that this plot device will inevitably be used.
Michel Franco is famous for his provocative chamber dramas: "After Lucia," "Chronic," "April's Daughter." His style took on a different scale in the unexpectedly monumental anti-utopia "New Order," which won the Grand Prix in Venice. After it, the director returned to low-budget forms in "Sundown" and "Memory."
His current film finally combines the large with the small: it is a very significant film about global problems, created with minimal means.
The role of the impeccably self-possessed, unapproachable and elegant Jennifer was played by Jessica Chastain, who had just played a poor and insecure heroine in Franco's "Memory." The handsome Fernando was played by ballet premier Isaac Hernandez, originally from Guadalajara, who made an incredible career in the USA in real life. His plasticity gives "Dreams" an unexpected choreographic quality, especially noticeable in the simultaneously conventional and physiological erotic scenes.
The camera of the Belgian virtuoso Yves Cape (the operator of Bruno Dumont and Leos Carax shot all of Franco's most important films) is so expressive that the picture ceases to need replicas at all.
"Dreams" could have been a modern ballet – a revision of the classic plot about a prince or aristocrat who falls in love with a simple girl. Given the changed realities, gender roles have swapped places, but social ones have not changed at all. And these differences turn out to be insurmountable even in the 21st century.
However, the worst obstacle to the harmonious coexistence of lovers is not external proprieties and conventions, not repressive laws and all-pervading racism. The heroes simply want different things, which is unequivocally indicated by the title. Fernando's dream is to settle with his beloved, move to the States for good and make a career there, since his talent allows it. Jennifer's dreams are the opposite: to escape from the regimented world where she is doomed to respectable loneliness, only occasionally coming to free Mexico City. The conflict between dreams leads to a tragic rift, and Jennifer's caricatured father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend) are not villains, but extras in this everyday drama.
It seems that at the same time, Franco ridicules the widespread dream, if not of every, then of every second Mexican filmmaker: to make a career in Hollywood, to shoot in English, to work with stars, to please the American, and therefore, the world public. The director has long found a common language with a very wide audience, and he does not want to give up his Mexican identity.
"Dreams" is a bilingual film, and if Fernando understands every phrase of his beloved, she still cannot string two words together in Spanish. But the point is not that the American Capulets are more ignorant or selfish than the Mexican Montagues. "Dreams" rises from observing sleeping xenophobia and social inequality to reflecting on love as a space of inevitable inequality. Whoever of the partners has more power will show more cruelty to insist on their own. Of course, in the name of the good of both.
This axiom leads the picture to a merciless finale, the meager accuracy of which could be envied by Haneke or Trier. However, truly strong love stories have never tolerated happy endings.
It so happened that "Dreams" was first shown at the Berlinale on Valentine's Day. On the same day, an ironic Valentine's card with portraits of Donald Trump himself and the head of the border service, Tom Homan, appeared in the official account of the US presidential administration on the X network. The accompanying text promised deportation to all illegal immigrants.
