Sold, hit in the stomach pit: with which expressions you always want to describe filmmakers like this, Michel Franco (“memory”) has long been a guarantee of unpleasant but absolutely outstanding cinema – and he has not forgotten the shock factor in his latest work. “”Dreams“Opened with a view of a truck standing in the landscape. Sunshine, calm. Who knows how long the vehicle has been parked there? Then a sudden cut, night, the cargo room wobbles, people desperate the walls and call for help. Numerous refugees from Mexico have been closely locked up until someone finally opens the gates.
Franco makes a young dancer named Fernando (Isaac Hernández) appear at this scene. Just smuggled into the USA in the truck, he is now wrong through the wilderness to civilization. His goal: San Francisco, where he dreams of the big ballet career and lives his extremely wealthy, much older friend Jennifer (Jessica Chastain). She is the heiress of a family company, a foundation that is committed to the dance business. The relationship between the two seems to be doomed between financial dependencies and gaps in power. Unstoppable, she slides into the disaster …
Behind Jennifer's elegance, deeper abysses are open to …
Jessica Chastain (Oscar for “The Eyes of Tamy Faye”) plays her figure as a woman in emotional armor. Even when she appears on the canvas for the first time, dressed in white and dressed in an elegant coat, she exudes the complete inaccessibility. An ambitious, calculating businesswoman is, draped in a cool designer temple. And it is only a feat of this film that its acting performance has been so multifaceted that Chastain still abysses a rest of ambivalence and vulnerability even in the worst failures and darkest, which arise in the character of their role, which is by no means Remove, but learn to understand at least within her reality of life.
As usual ice -cold style
Even in Michel Franco's last film “Memory”, Chastain shone – also a highly disturbing relationship history. And Franco leads you around the nose again this time when he always indicates his audience in a fragments of fragmented and soberly observed scenes that everything could be fine for this business woman and the fled dancer before the next Merciless deep blow follows.
Franco has now perfected his fragmentary narrative style. Its short, highlights on situations, these bleak, mostly static -filmed total settings provoke again precisely looking and study: Which emotions may arise there, what actually happens there, what strikes these figures? Inconspicuous, uncanny and strange also fall in one in Franco's latest film in one. And although the author filmmaker has already told more twisted, “Dreams” is an extremely clear and concentrated work, as it develops his attitude and is reduced on the screen.
The stranger as a game ball
Since all sorts of familiar motifs from the last films “New Order”, “Sundown” and “Memory” dive to: capitalist exploitation, tourism, shops that break down families from the inside, trauma, hopeless relationships. All of this is embedded in a ruthless settlement with American migration policy and the social thinking patterns that are connected with it. Many films deal with this topic, many have illuminated the suffering and arduous life of migrants against the background of the failed American dream. Michel Franco condenses this in a further contribution and parabolically on an erotic affair.
Longs and ideologies are projected onto strangers, while privileges that Jessica Chastain's figure belong to are hardly wanting to admit how much they degraded, take advantage of it, shape them according to their own fantasies and attributions and urge toxic conditions. It is always clear to them who ultimately sits on the longer lever. But what is it now that drives this figure? Does she feel real love for this young dancer? Does she actually want a future together with him and if so, according to what rules? Or is this just about the desire for possession?
Love or toy?
Does Jennifer long for a Toyboy, a kind of vacation affair that you hold in the distance and then visits when it is compatible with the next business meeting? The pressure from outside does the rest, after all, in conservative social logic a woman like Jennifer has to keep away from a central refugee. You think something better. Working, serving and submitting, this task is assigned to the strangers. But woe, they ask more! Michel Franco is not interested in utopias and reconciliations. He is concerned with confrontation.
“Dreams” takes both perspectives, including those of the dancer who exchange ideas with other migrants, who are similar. He fadedly sticks to his hopes of a better life in the United States, although he has been deported for succinct reasons. He even accepts the greatest danger to life. And so the entire film relaxes as a clever sequence of movement processes. “Dreams” sometimes almost like a stalking story, as figures can be recreated here, flee in front of each other and then suddenly meet again. Experiences are sometimes experienced by Jennifer, sometimes from Fernando. They all summit in frustration and finally under violence. And the world, which is mainly staged here in dreary gray and blue tones, is all life, all empathy escapes.
A new Michael Haneke?
The last half hour of “Dreams” is once again raising all the search and separation processes to a whole new level. It shifts the repeated exceeding of national, but also interpersonal limits to another test arrangement, which repeatedly shifts its transshipment sites and dividing walls. The atrocities that are pronounced, unveiled and added here for a while. And yes, maybe Franco sometimes still likes a little too much in these shocks and provocations. The cynicism that is inherent in them still results in a consistent punch line for this toxic relationship history.
Perhaps Michael Haneke's films (“The Piano Player”) are available as a comparison. Not in their game with the medium of film, but in the hardened, undercooled and relentlessly confrontative way, as people are observed here who do hideous to each other. “Dreams”, dreams, Michel Franco called his film. And you can now be sure that dreams in his works are always driven particularly shattering against the wall.
Conclusion: “Dreams” is another urgent, difficult to digest drama by Michel Franco. His new film takes a abysmal look at the life situation of migrants in the United States by confronting a privileged majority society with its erotic obsessions and oppression fantasies.
We saw “Dreams” as part of the Berlinale 2025, where it was shown as part of the official competition.