After months of HE irritation and complaining due to an apparent commitment on the part of Greenwich Entertainment to under-promote if not suppress Michel Franco‘s Dreams and only days before the film’s limited 2.27 opening, I’ve finally seen this 98-minute film and have come away…well, certainly not annoyed or negative-minded, as some critics have been.
It’s a smart, bracing, well-honed thing by a top-tier auteur known for cold films (I think Franco is one of the toughest, sharpest directors working today). And yet the last 20 minutes left me a bit puzzled.
Dreams is about a passionate sexual affair between Jennifer (the 40ish Jessica Chastain), a privileged, headstrong, San Francisco-based rich woman who runs her family’s arts foundation, which includes a sponsorship of a prestigious ballet school in Mexico City. During her visits there she’s been discreetly “doing” a gifted ballet dancer named Fernando (the 30something Isaac Hernandez), but has been keeping this hot-and-heavy affair from her brother Jake (Rupert Friend) and, more importantly, from her Daddy Warbucks father (the dreary, dull-faced Marshall Bell), who of course covers all the bills.
The story is activated when Fernando decides to expand the cultural perimeters of this relationship by entering the U.S. illegally and then making his way north to San Francisco and into Jennifer’s Russian Hill condo and soon after her bed.
Jennifer, seemingly delighted with all of the dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick, helps Fernando land an audition with a top-tier SF ballet school, which he aces. And yet Jennifer, we gradually come to learn, is unsettled by Fernando having invaded her home turf. She tries, as noted, to keep their relationship on the down-low, but he smells this and shows resentment, reacts angrily.
Jennifer won’t say this in so many words, but as much as she loves Fernando she wants him back in Mexico City, tucked safely away. She wants the lid kept on.
Franco makes it clear that while Jennifer feigns the brisk and aloof attitude of a cosmopolitan woman of means, she knows where her bread is buttered and therefore does what daddy suggests when he tells her (although not in so many words) to cool it with the beaner. (HE to woke pearl-clutchers: By using the “b” word I’m pretending to think and speak like her flinty father and brother do deep down.)
Dad basically says (a) “you can’t brazenly fuck your Mexican boytoy with all our San Francisco friends looking on”, (b) “fucking this guy is bad for appearances, out of bounds” and (c) “do what you want during your Mexico City trips but not here.”
SPOILER PARAGRAPH: Jennifer winds up doing a really shitty thing to Fernando, and then she feels compelled to admit what she’s done (can’t lie, can’t hold it in) and he gets even angrier and treats her harshly and brutishly (including fucking her in the ass in a rapey way), and then she brings her brother into the situation and Fernando is beaten up and made to howl in pain.
Basic lesson for rich white women: Never fuck the help or your social lessers. But if you do anyway and the lessers start behaving presumptuously or inappropriately, you need to do the hard thing. You need to be cruel in order to make your point.
I didn’t find Jennifer’s harshness toward Fernando dramatically satisfying. Franco basically goes with a “white people are racist shits who don’t give a damn about south-of-the-border people so fuck them and tbe horses they ride on” message. Except racism always obscures the truth of things, and that’s what this film more or less does.
If you want to be liberal about it, Dreams is an efficient capturing of a certain social malignancy. Chastain and Hernández are excellent in their roles; everything in this film feels steady, straight and believable. HE urges you to catch it.
