‘Dreams’ Review: Jessica Chastain Gives a Daring Performance in Michel Franco’s Most Powerful Film Yet
Michel Franco is back in a pissed-off register about the world we live in with his crisply directed class critique “Dreams,” where the Mexican writer/director rails into the limousine liberal American one-percent identity with all the subtlety of a power drill. But the film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.
Chastain gives her riskiest performance in some time as a rich arts patron who encourages Fernando to cross the border illegally in order for her foundation to give an American showcase of his art. Many of Chastain’s recent movies, including her Oscar-winning “Eyes of Tammy Faye” and even Franco’s own bittersweet dementia romance “Memory,” have a feminist or at least redemptive streak. Not so with her turn in “Dreams” as a woman who invites little sympathy (until she does in the film’s harrowing conclusion) even while she’s being played like a marionette by her father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend)
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Franco took a brief detour from angsty cross-cultural satire for “Memory,” where Chastain’s character invents a childhood abuse to keep her distance from a man who appears to be stalking her at a high school class reunion. There’s not a lot of hope in “Dreams,” and for that, it’s a movie of our times and one that maybe can only exist because of them. It’s about how the falsity of the American dream (a dream that is immigrants, after all) propels Mexican people to make the illegal dangerous crossing at all, and about how the U.S. and Mexico need each other in all ways. Remember that Franco is the guy who lit up a nuclear class war in “New Order” and watched a father throw his daughter’s social media bully off a boat in “After Lucia,” and you’ll have a sense of where the bitter, bruising “Dreams” lands in his filmography. Franco works again with cinematographer Yves Cape to cooly construct long takes where entire scenes play out without quick, successive cutting, giving “Dreams” an at times documentary-like shape particularly in its coverage of Fernando’s ballet performances — and Jennifer’s cold, cheerless day-to-day.
“Dreams” opens unsettlingly with a scene of screaming migrants inside a truck at the Texas-American border in Laredo, and yet it ends with an image even worse. Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain) has lured Fernando to America, and specifically where-else-but socially liberal and tech-bubbled-out San Francisco, to fulfill the promise of a love affair she began during some not-long-ago “work trip” to Mexico. But Jennifer never seems to be doing much work at all, instead procuring artists and finding causes that benefit her family fortune and keep its image rightly facelifted in the community and media. Her father is one of those tireless advocates of the arts who loves to show off his collection. Jennifer, meanwhile, keeps a pied-à-terre in a rapidly Americanizing Mexico City, where she goes looking for Fernando after they break up because she’s ashamed to be seen with him around her father’s colleagues.
If you didn’t already know that Hernández is an actual American Ballet Theatre-trained dancer, then you will from the balletic sex scenes he and Chastain have choreographed in the film, which get about as graphic as you can go without hardcore nudity. What works about them (and makes them hot) is that they tell us more about the dynamic of the characters, who are mad in love but under immense strain to make any good outcome of that a functioning possibility in Jennifer’s carefully calibrated world. There’s a great scene, too, where Jennifer, adrift over their breakup, imagines a time when she and Fernando exchanged intensely dirty talk over a kitchen island, and if you’ve never thought you’d get the chance to hear Jessica Chastain utter, “I’m going to suck your balls without breathing on your cock,” here it is. Jennifer, meanwhile, can’t speak Spanish and uses Google Translate to interact with the invisible workers who tend to her houses in either San Francisco or Mexico City. It doesn’t matter where she goes; the loneliness follows her everywhere.
“I don’t think you care what happens to me,” Fernando tells Jennifer at one point, and she is freaking out over a potential new life he is now forming in San Francisco without her. Franco is the heir apparent to the Michael Haneke world of unsettled, austere psychological pain against geopolitical backdrops onscreen, and Chastain is more game than ever to play along with his hopeless world. His last film “Memory” suggested something sweet afoot. Not so this time, as “Dreams” shocks us back into Franco the dark storyteller, only pain and disappointment in store for his leads.
It’s no coincidence the office that Jennifer’s father runs resembles the inside of a detention center or prison. As the noose of being illegal in America tightens around Fernando, tighter, too, become the golden handcuffs put on Jennifer by her family, as she becomes more and more a ghost in a gilded cage. The camera at times threatens to erase or make anonymous Fernando, shooting him from the back (like when Jennifer lustily goes down on him in a stairwell) as if the lens itself is taking on the privileged position of power. Jennifer obviously loves Fernando but protecting her wealth and reputation and position in her family orbit takes primacy, to her own toxified detriment.
Chastain makes the mask that hides Jennifer’s pain translucent at just the right punctuating moments, impressive for a character who lives behind a 24-7 front that never exudes agency. What Jennifer says in the back of a car in the film’s final moments, the sound dropped to a whisper behind glass, will ruin your day, but it’s so disturbingly inevitable that if you were paying attention, it won’t surprise you at all, Jennifer’s dreams reduced to a single tear, and Fernando’s never to be had at all.
Grade: A-
“Dreams” premiered at the 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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