“Dreams”, Law of the Strongest

Michael Franco premieres Dreams at the 75th Berlinale, starring Jessica Chastain and Mexican dancer Isaac Hernández, accompanied by Rupert Friend and Marshall Bell. During the filming of Memory (2023), in which the actress starred alongside Peter Sarsgaard, the director already had a new project in mind in which to work with a performer who seduced him two weeks after they began collaborating.

The director of New Order tells a story without subtleties, in which he once again tackles a social and political issue, this time immigration, through Jennifer, a wealthy San Francisco heiress whose family foundation supports ballet and the arts. In this context she meets young Fernando, a talented dancer with whom she has a passionate romance that defies laws and borders. But Franco doesn’t stick to the cliché of a love story contradicted by the system, but delves into the motivations of both lovers, without concessions.

Dreams starts in a truck full of immigrants who have been abandoned and left to fend for themselves by their smuggler, but an athletic young man with a harmonious body and a determined gait manages to escape when the border police locate and open the trailer. We arrive with him in San Francisco and instead of following him on an odyssey of misery and struggle, he takes us to an elegant duplex, where he immediately locates the keys in the entrance. There he meets Jennifer, and tries to lead a new life, ruled by emotional manipulation and sexual dependency.

In Dreams no one is innocent, there are victims and executioners, although some play with the marked cards they have received for belonging to the privileged class. Between San Francisco and Mexico, in a future that Jennifer is in control more than she thinks, the story unfolds a chessboard of interests, where the hope of being able to change things in a world that responds to our desires is until the last moment the only trump card that Fernando retains.

Jennifer’s dedication to their relationship seems to know no limits but, as her wealthy father reminds her, they do exist and it will be the clumsiness of her lover’s desperation that will unleash in her that attachment of class that her loneliness and her need had hidden. Throughout the film, the comings and goings between the two countries describe two very different worlds for both of them; in Fernando’s case, it represents a leap into a universe of professional possibilities in keeping with his talent, but in Jennifer’s case, it changes her personality. When she is in San Francisco, her clothes and Louis Vuitton accessories turn her into a cold mannequin in her stilettos, her house is icy, with unwelcoming materials and colours, metal, glass, greys, blacks, while her house in Mexico is warm, lively, with plants and natural materials, where she receives Fernando’s friends, in an atmosphere of familiarity and spontaneity.

This bubble will be the ideal formula for Jennifer to be able to live her relationship without fear of losing her lover, so she tries to convince him to let this golden cage replace his desire for progress and success. However, the situation taken to the extreme will end up in the final twenty minutes with a reversal of roles for which Michel Franco has been preparing us throughout the film. The director uses his characters as archetypes that convey ideas, attitudes and ideologies, and in Dreams he does it again, and if we accept his rules we will have witnessed a rehearsal of power relations where the law of the strongest always prevails.