Michel Franco is back in a damned register about the world we live in with his sharply targeted class criticism ”Dreams“Where the Mexican author/director rails into the limousine liberal American one-percent identity with all subtlety of a power drill. But filmSidely disturbing force lies in how Franco packages his Mexico-Breight Metafor from the US-Mexico-with the rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young Ballerina -lovers Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer) who stands for each – to an addictive and destructive love story as sharp as the film’s major political problems.
Chastain provides its most risky performance at a time as a rich art cartridge that encourages Fernando to transfer the border illegally for her foundation to provide an American exhibition of her art. Many of Chastain’s latest movies, including her Oscar-winning “Eyes of Tammy Faye” and even Franco’s own Bittersweet Dementia Romance “Memory,” Have a feminist or at least childbirth line. Not as by turn in “Dreams” as a woman who invites some sympathy (until she makes in the film’s upcoming conclusion) even when she is played as a puppet by her father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend)
Franco took a brief detour from anxious cross -cultural satire for “Memory,“Where Chastain’s character invents an abuse of children to keep away from a man who seems to persecute her at a high school. There is not much hope in “dreams”, and because it is a movie from our times and one that may only exist because of them. It’s about how the falsehood of the American dream (a dream that is Immigrants, after all), drive Mexican people to make the illegal dangerous intersection at all, and about how the United States and Mexico need each other in every way. Remember that Franco is the guy who turned up a nuclear war in “new order” and saw a father throw his daughter’s social media bully from a boat in “After Lucia”, and you will have a sense of where the bitter, bruises “Dreams “Lands in his filmography. Franco is working again with Kinematographer Yves Cape to cooly Construct Long takes where whole scenes play without fast, successive cutting, gives “Dreams” a sometimes documentary-like form, especially in its coverage of Fernando’s ballet performances-and Jennifer’s Cold, Cheerless Day today.
“Dreams” opens worrying with a scene with screaming migrants inside a truck at the Texas-American border in Laredo, and yet it ends with a picture even worse. Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain) has attracted Fernando to America, and specifically where socially liberal and technology bubbled San Francisco, to fulfill promises of a love affair that she began for a long time “work trip” to Mexico. But Jennifer never seems to do a lot of work at all, instead acquire artists and find causes that benefit her family wealth and keeps her image with the right facelift in society and the media. Her father is one of them tireless Proponents of the art who love to showcase their collection. In the meantime, Jennifer holds a Pied-à-Terre in a fast American Ixico City, where she is looking for Fernando after they broke up because she is ashamed to be seen with him around his father’s colleagues.
If you did not already know that Hernández is a real American ballet-theater-educated dancer, you come from the ballet sex scenes that he and Chastain have choreographed in the film, which will be as graphic as you can go without hardcore nudity. What works about them (and makes them hot) is that they tell more about the character’s dynamics, which are crazy in love but under enormous load to make some good results of it a working opportunity in Jennifer carefully calibrated the world. There is a fantastic scene as well, where Jennifer, adrift over their division, imagines a time when she and Fernando exchanged intensely dirty conversation over a kitchen island, and if you never thought you would get the chance to hear Jessica Chastain Utter, “I Will suck your balls without breathing on your cock, “here it is. In the meantime, Jennifer cannot speak Spanish and uses Google Translate to interact with the invisible workers who tend to her house in either San Francisco or Mexico City. It doesn’t matter where she goes; Loneliness follows her everywhere.
“I don’t think you care about what happens to me,” Fernando tells Jennifer at one point, and she freaks out over a potentially new life that he now forms in San Francisco without her. Franco is the heir who is obvious to Michael Haneke world of worried, tight psychological pain against geopolitical backgrounds on the screen, and Chastain is more play than ever to play with his hopeless world. His last movie “Memory” suggested something sweet on the foot. Not so this time, as “dreams” shock us back to Franco the dark storyteller, just pain and disappointment in stores for his joints.
It is no coincidence that the office that Jennifer’s father runs is similar to the inside of an detention center or prison. When the loop is illegal in America tightening around Fernando, also tighter, the golden handcuffs on Jennifer become by her family, as she becomes more and more a ghost in a gilded cage. The camera sometimes threatens to erase or make anonymous Fernando and shoot him from his back (as when Jennifer hilariously goes down on him in a stairwell) as if the lens himself takes on the privileged position of power. Jennifer obviously loves Fernando, but to protect her wealth and reputation and position in her family cave takes precedence to her own toxified disadvantage.
Chastain makes the mask that hides Jennifer pain translucent at just right puncture moments, impressive to a character that lives behind a 24-7 front that never radiates the agency. What Jennifer says on the back of a car in the last moments of the film, the sound that is released to a whisper behind glass, will ruin your day, but it is so worryingly inevitable that if you were attentive, it will not surprise you at all, Jennifer’s Dreams Reduced to a single tear, and Fernandos has never had at all.
Rating: A-
“Dreams” premiered at 2025 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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