Berlinale Competition – “Dreams”: Toxic power games

A truck at night and then during the day. You can hear shocking screams, people pounded in it knock on the walls of the truck. When they are finally allowed to get out, they are completely invalidated. A young man named Fernando (Isaac Hernández) succeeds in loosening from the group. Tarely drags himself through the merciless heat of California. When he finally reaches a diner, he thirsts thirstily on a carafe with tap water on a table. He is thrown out. Guests like him are not desirable.

Ten years ago, Michel Franco was chosen for the best first film with “600 miles” in the Berlinale Section Panorama. At that time he told a Mexican drug smuggler and an agent of the Federal Police Authority ATF, which approach each other through a hostage -taking. In “Dreams”, his ninth film, with which he was playing in competition for the first time and who celebrated world premiere on February 15 in the Berlinale Palace, he is drawn to Mexico again. This time the director links a toxic affair with a socially relevant topic: the influx of illegal immigrants to the USA. According to Statista.com, around 100,000 people were arrested in 2024 when trying to illegally entered the USA.

When the protagonist of Franco’s new film finally arrives in the city villa of Jennifer (Jessica Chastain), he plunges on the fridge, stuffing his mouth full of blueberries. She asks him how he came to the USA, what it cost him to go through to San Francisco. He becomes your lover. There is wild sex, completely choreographed by the director. Franco is interested in the physical, in terms of content he relies on a simple narrative structure.

Fernando is impulsive, Jennifer is rather cool, elegant and factual. She lives in an almost unadorned house; Simple art hangs in the bedroom. She wears designer clothing, is perfectly styled, the epitome of a rich American. Together with her brother (Rupert Friend), Jennifer heads her father’s foundation (Marshall Bell). Jennifer and the dancer Fernando got to know each other through a dance company in Mexico – a project of the foundation. Now he fought himself through to America – not for the first time – to finally build a new life there. Jennifer, who could be his mother from old age, can no longer separate her tidy life from him. When the head of a ballet company becomes aware of Fernando, the young man seems to be at the destination of his dreams.

This January Isaac Hernández was crowned the first dancer from the American Ballet Theater. He also dances in the film with such great precision that you have no doubt about your talent. Franco, who also wrote the script, spontaneously decided to tell this story about dance when he saw Hernández dancing. He spoke to the artist who had no experience of acting and hired him away from the spot. The professional dancer does not convince as an actor.

This may also be due to the fact that Chastain and Hernández are changing clichés. Franco uses architecture to describe feelings. The pictures, carefully selected by scene designer Alfredo Wigueras, record cameraman Yves Cape in huge, museum -like rooms. They are pictures of loneliness and cold. The effect increases the fact that the chemistry between Chastain and Hernández is wrong. And yet the relatively simple and predictable plot does not touch, the film looks tough. Only when the anger of the two characters discharges each other do they get a profile in the end: a grimace -like one.

»Dreams«, Mexico 2024. CLIEN CLIE CLOCK: Michel Franco. MIT JOSSICA CHASTAIN, ISAAC HERNAINDEZ, RUPERED FRIEND, MARHALL BELL, ELIGO MELEGEND. 100 min.
February 19, 9:20 p.m., Uber Eats Music Hall (sold out)