Michel Franco’s “Dreams” opens on a long shot of a truck in the desert. Cut to a night shot when voices can be heard on the mix, calling for help. We piece together that it’s a truck full of immigrants, one of whom escapes the huddled masses and starts walking. From the beginning, it feels like the director of controversial films about power like “New Order” is back in that register, leaving behind the twisted character studies of films like “Sundown” and “Chronic” for another dissection of power and class divides, maybe even a timely one, given how much stories of immigration enforcement have dominated headlines. Sadly, “Dreams” never figures out what it wants to say, and what it does convey is done with so little affect or pulse that it almost feels like an intentional choice to tell a “hot” story in as “cool” a way as possible. Is Franco saying that cross-cultural and cross-wealth affairs are inherently broken by filming this sexually-charged story with as little passion as possible? Maybe, but that’s a tough sell for a movie that’s almost actively boring.
The figure that emerges from the truck in the opening scene is a dancer named Fernando Rodriguez (Isaac Hernández), who finds his way from there all the way to San Francisco, into the home owned by Jennifer McCarthy (Jessica Chastain, significantly better in Franco’s also-significantly better “Memory”), who we quickly learn was Fernando’s lover in Mexico. He’s come there to finally be with his wealthy socialite girlfriend, but problems arise when she refuses to be seen in public with him. Her rich father, Michael (Marshall Bell), and snooty brother, Jake (Rupert Friend), certainly wouldn’t approve of the princess of their family being connected to a Mexican immigrant. She doesn’t come out and say that directly, but Fernando takes the hint, dumping her and trying to start his own life.
From here, “Dreams” should be a film about two people with such a strong sexual connection that their social differences can’t keep them apart, and Franco does relish in explicit encounters between Jennifer and Fernando, ones so graphic by modern standards that the implication often seems to be that this is all that these two have. She feigns stronger affection and support, but seems more interested in this young man’s body than anything else; one struggles to discern any motivations for Jennifer, or, for that matter, Fernando. They’re remarkably shallow characters, ones who feel like writer’s outlines instead of real people with back stories, needs, and desires. They’re the white American socialite and the sexy young immigrant with whom she has sex with, and that’s almost all you learn about either of them. It’s one of several reasons “Dreams” feels hollow.
“Dreams” consistently feels like a film designed to provoke, but it never says enough to do so. It’s sort of an extrapolation of that classic conservative talking point that insists that anyone who supports immigration should be willing to take a family in to live in their home, an idea that there’s a core of hypocrisy even in the liberal establishment that would never be willing to go out on the town with an immigrant boyfriend. But it doesn’t seem to want to judge Jennifer enough to sell this theme, even turning her into a victim in a final act that uses sexual violence in a pretty grotesque, exploitative way.
Don’t get it twisted. It’s OK, even preferred, for a film like “Dreams” to leave some social themes open to interpretation. But there needs to be something to hold onto, something to interpret, or at least experience on a character level. “Dreams” is so aggressively affectless that it’s ultimately as forgettable as its title, something you might half-remember after waking up.
