"It’s impossible for me to split life and film,” said Michel Franco, one of Mexico’s leading filmmakers, in an interview about his latest movie, Dreams, which opened throughout Israel on Thursday.
The film can be seen as both a dark love story and an allegory about Mexican-American relations.
Dreams stars Oscar-winner Jessica Chastain as Jennifer, a wealthy socialite and philanthropist involved in a steamy affair with Fernando (real-life American Ballet Theater principal dancer Isaac Hernandez), a younger, Mexican dancer. Fernando hopes to make it as a dancer in America, and also to be publicly acknowledged by Jennifer as her boyfriend and to be accepted by her snobbish family.
It features harrowing scenes of what Fernando and other migrants go through to cross the border into the US, masterfully combining the personal and the political to tell a story that is both dreamlike and, at times, nightmarish.
That dreamlike quality characterizes most of Franco’s work. English-speaking audiences may know the director from his previous movie, Memory, which also starred Chastain, in which she played a social worker caring for a former classmate (Peter Sarsgaard), who has early onset dementia. Like Dreams, it’s a genre-defying story that doesn’t have any easy answers.
Michel Franco speaks on his career
The director has been moving back and forth professionally between Mexico and the US for most of his 20-plus year career. His acclaimed films include Sundown, in which Tim Roth stars as a wealthy British man who hides out in a cheap Mexican resort, and the 2020 drama New Order, which stirred controversy in Mexico for its dystopian look at a high-society wedding interrupted by violent rioters, as part of a series of disturbances used to establish a military dictatorship.
While he focuses on diverse subjects, his films are all highly cinematic and feature wonderful performances and quirky, interesting characters.
SPEAKING ABOUT Dreams, he said, “For me, there is the drama of the love story, if you may call it a love story, but I wrote it knowing that, of course, it represents and mirrors a bigger frame... I was interested in how the relationship would work if one character has the power and the security of Jessica’s character... She has a double life when she travels to Mexico, and she enjoys a certain freedom that she doesn’t allow herself to enjoy in the States, where she’s very limited by the men in her family and she doesn’t have the courage to break free from that, so I knew all those elements would play a part.”
As much as the human drama between the two characters is compelling, it’s impossible to watch the movie without thinking of the context of the political struggle of America to keep out Mexican immigrants. Franco said it was a subject that has been on his mind for years.
“I shot it and wrote it way before [President] Trump was reelected. I had the idea even before Trump’s first term,” he said. “The relationship between Mexico and the States has always been similar to what it is today. I think the biggest difference with Trump is his speech, the way he communicates things and how he’s pointing fingers, but it’s always been a relationship where one country is above the other. And Mexicans and Latin American immigrants – and immigrants and from all over the world – are unappreciated in the States… Growing up in Mexico, I always felt this imbalance.”
WHEN HE first wrote the script, he said, “People were telling me that I was exaggerating about the way Fernando gets deported – and now it looks like something much less tough than what we read in the papers every day. So, it’s always tricky with stories that deal with social and political aspects of the world; the reality can change and it can become even more extreme.”
Proud of his Mexican identity, he said, “It’s not a one-way relationship [between the US and Mexico], because the Americans need Mexicans in the workforce... but the US is not treating and acknowledging Mexicans as human beings with rights and needs – it’s just using them. So I think from the very start I knew where the film was headed.”
Chastain came aboard very early in the process, and they worked together on developing her complex, sometimes unsympathetic character. “She liked the challenge,” said Franco.
“We were shooting Memory when I first talked to her about Dreams and... I casually started talking about this idea I had without knowing if she would be interested in playing that part because it is a ruthless character, but I was not that surprised when she quickly said yes... She knows that with me, she’ll explore characters that are not usually found in more Hollywood studio-driven productions.” The two are “on the same page” when it comes to collaborating, and he said he hoped they would work together in the future.
HERNANDEZ IS a true phenomenon, the most exciting dancer-turned-actor since Mikhail Baryshnikov decades ago. After Franco saw Hernandez perform, he realized that the character should be a dancer: “I immediately knew I wanted to work with him and I was certain that he would pull off the job even though he’s not an actor – because at the end of the day, he has this experience dancing and communicating with audiences, so he was great.
“He’s a very clever person and Jessica was also very helpful to make him feel comfortable and challenging him in the right way, so it was a great experience and I’m sure he’s going to keep acting because he’s a natural… Mexico is very proud of him; he’s one of the most charismatic dancers and everyone’s proud of his talent.”
Franco, who seems much younger than his 45 years, as he speaks enthusiastically about his leading actors, is a cineaste who credits Luis Bunuel, the great Spanish filmmaker who made several important movies in Mexico, as one of his greatest inspirations, as well as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, was one of the main influences on Dreams.
He said he produces all his films and keeps the budgets low, which has allowed him to create a body of work on his own terms. “I enjoy a lot of freedom because I keep them small production-wise, but that’s because I want to be able to reshape whatever has to be reshaped and to take it as far as I need to,” he said.
While Franco has no illusions about this movie changing the tense situation between Mexico and the US, he said, “I don’t think that Dreams can change things on a large scale, but I think it can definitely start many conversations between the viewers and make a contribution in that way.”