Being equal, isn’t it the most difficult thing for a couple to achieve, if at all possible? Isn’t love ultimately about balancing power and control, desire and trust, over someone else’s body and mind? And how can that get out of hand when different economic and legal statuses begin shedding feelings? Michel Franco’s Dreams premiered at the 75th Berlinale and competing for the Golden Bear, wrestles with these very questions. The Mexican director reunites with leading star, Jessica Chastain, after their collaboration on his previous tender film Memory (2023). In Dreams they deliver a fierce portrait of a neo-colonial love story, a Pocahontas of the Trump era.
It’s night, in the middle of nowhere. A truck is swaying as people scream for help from inside. The migrants are trying to survive with what little air and space they have. Suddenly, when most of them appear to be dead, the doors open and they emerge as cannon fodder from the bowels of this metal monster. A young man, whose physicality is immediately striking, separates from the group and staggers forward into the unknown. His first stop is a diner on the highway, where he searches for water. There, a Mexican waitress on shift kicks him out as if he were a dog, only to pick him up a short time later, take him home, and offer him a meal and a shower. His journey continues to San Francisco, to a chic neighborhood. Knowing where the spare keys to the house are hidden, he easily lets himself into a sterile yet luxurious apartment overlooking the valley. After raiding the fridge, he installs himself in the master bedroom. His naked, sculpted buttocks winking at the audience from between the expensive sheets. A woman comes home and slips on top of him. Two people in love, is the first impression. But reality is there to confront the romantics. The young man is Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a young ballet dancer from Mexico City. The older woman is Jennifer (Chastain), a wealthy philanthropist from San Francisco. So close but yet so distant. The two met in Mexico City, as Jessica is the financier of the art academy where Fernando used to work. There they bloomed. Now, in San Francisco they dry out.
The differences between Jessica and Fernando couldn’t be more obvious: age, class, race, gender. Yet they seem to love each other. Asymmetry is only a weak euphemism for the unequal power relations that bind them together. The inequalities between the two are exacerbated by family and social prejudices. “We were happy in Mexico”, Jessica says at one point, implicitly meaning “where I had everything under control”, keeping Fernando in a golden cage and coming and going as she pleased. This game of presence and absence, of appearing and disappearing, becomes a weapon that the two take up in turn. Fernando has his own dreams and desires, as we learn when he talks about his former life in New York. He left Mexico to be with Jessica and to fulfill her dreams, mainly erotic ones. But he is also eager to seize any professional opportunity, which, because of his status as an undocumented migrant, will lead to his ruin. Fernando’s body is symbolically his greatest asset, but also his greatest obstacle, and ultimately his downfall. The key to love and acceptance, with Jessica as well as with his fellow dancer and choreographer, but also the evidence of his “crime”. In today’s USA, just being an undocumented migrant makes you a criminal. Premiering just weeks after Trump’s re-election, Dreams invites the public to reflect on what the United States has become. The land of dreams and promise, founded on the melting pot of migrants from all over the world, is now all about “America first” and “Make America great again”. Yes, but what “America”? White US.
Colonial history has never been more evident. Jessica’s extreme sexualization of Fernando’s racialized body is only the most obvious sign of a more complex relationship of subalternity between the two. How she provides him with money, shelter, clothes, and food on her terms emphasizes the dependency. When she asks him not to speak Spanish with his countrymen in her presence, the mission of civilization is in full swing. She is, after all, a philanthropist, full of love and good intentions, but very unidirectional. Even the obvious signs of loneliness and neurosis don’t make it easier to sympathize with such a manipulative egocentric character, incapable of empathy. When Fernando shows any desire, it is immediately suppressed or ignored. He is here to please, as a pet, and Mexico is the ultimate place for that. In Jessica’s imagination, as in that of the US people, it is the place of good food, sun, color, and desire. There, Jessica suddenly wears airy, embellished dresses instead of monochrome, geometric ones. The house is full of colors and plants, very different from the ascetic one in San Francisco. Sometimes music plays in the background and friends come over to visit. Director Franco manages to convey the overarching dichotomy that dominates the protagonists’ lives through small, piercing details, in which the senses also play an important role. DoP Yves Cape provides the images for this detailed investigation of the development of this historical, anthropological, and sociological relation between the US and its closest neighbor, Mexico, at a time when reflection on power relations among the two is much needed.
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