No one is going to accuse Mexican director Michel Franco of subtlety. In his crudely effective new drama Dreams, which premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, he deals in sledgehammer fashion with race, sex and class in contemporary America. It’s a timely movie that feels especially relevant in the early days of the second Trump administration. At certain moments, it also has that seamy intensity that you find in Tennessee Williams plays about destructive relationships between characters of different ages and from vastly different social backgrounds. Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.
Hernández plays Fernando, a young Mexican illegal immigrant. He has just come back over the border hidden with other undocumented Mexicans in the back of a huge lorry. Early on, we see him walking in the baking heat, a hobo seemingly without money or prospects but still with a swaggering self-confidence. He’s making his way to San Francisco. Once he gets there, we realise he has been to the city before. He makes his way to the luxurious apartment of socialite Jennifer McCarthy (Chastain), and soon they’re having very vigorous sex. Fernando is a talented ballet dancer and she is his patron. She runs a foundation in Mexico, which is how she knows him.
