Time can move pretty slowly in dreams, but seldom as slowly as in the consistently interminable, periodically risible new movie Dreams. In an unlikely melding of genres, the movie seeks to combine the genres of an immigration expose, an erotic thriller, and a behind-the-scenes ballet drama. Jessica Chastain stars as Jennifer, a well-heeled San Franciscan who dabbles in running her family’s foundation, usurping U.S. immigration laws, and pursuing really unhealthy personal relationships. Isaac Hernandez plays Fernando, the Mexican dancer who, upon entering the country illegally, falls into Jennifer’s high-toned orbit.
This might sound like a provocative or at least so-bad-it’s-good mixture, but the result is deathly dull. The problem is that writer-director Michel Franco is intent on sapping any vitality from his material in what is for him the holy name of artiness, which for mere civilians is synonymous with tedium. Consider the opening image of a semitruck parked beside railroad tracks in what looks like the American Southwest. This shot comes before we have been introduced to any characters or even have a hold on the story. We discern, however, that the truck is in the Southwest because we have time to take in the arid surroundings and listen to the wind rustle the vegetation. In fact, we have plenty of time. The shot probably does not go on for more than a minute, but even 60 seconds of nothing still seems to go on forever. Because the prolongation of the shot tells us nothing, what point can it have but to show off its own studied deliberateness?
Eventually, we learn that the truck houses migrants who have crossed the border between Mexico and the U.S. illegally — a horrifying sight, to be sure. Among their ranks is the ballet dancer Fernando, whose profession is not among the least of the film’s improbabilities. Surely, for a talented performer such as Fernando, there might be a more legal, and less potentially lethal, way to get onstage in the United States? Yet even after Fernando climbs out of the dark, suffocating truck — a potent, though surely inadvertent, reminder of the profound inhumanity that results from illegal crossings — the film does not pick up the pace. Looking less like an undocumented worker seeking opportunity than a refugee from an arthouse movie, Fernando wanders along a gravel path accented by sagebrush. Where is the urgency? It is hard to have sympathy for someone whose trek is presented so ponderously.
Fernando turns up at the digs of his benefactor-lover Jennifer, who we know is filthy rich because her kitchen is so tastefully spare and ill-stocked. The duo resumes what seems to have been their past assignations, and she orders him high-end takeout — apparently the love language of the liberal elite. Using just enough ill-defined flashbacks and fantasy sequences needed to justify the title of Dreams, the film sketches the relationship between Jennifer and Fernando in increasingly raunchy love scenes. Jennifer is alternately hostile and swoony, while Fernando swings between resentment and gratitude. “I missed this — we should do it more often,” he tells her over coffee while both are dressed in bathrobes, a line that seems straight out of a Colleen Hoover adaptation. Jennifer continues in the various non-job jobs she has at her various philanthropic ventures, including a ballet academy in Mexico, while Fernando catches on with a professional ballet company in San Francisco. There is much mooniness to go along with the attempts at steaminess.
How are we expected to react to this, beyond doing a fair amount of cringing? Is the film a depiction of a roiling physical attraction in the manner of that relic of 1970s shock cinema, Last Tango in Paris? Or, more likely, are we meant to solemnly meditate on the inequitable relationship between the affluent modern aristocrat and the undocumented dancer? More than once, Fernando bemoans his dependence on Jennifer, who, in turn, does not seem consistently eager to present him as her beau among her seemingly open-minded but, spoiler alert, secretly prejudiced kith and kin. The last is a promising story thread in that it toys with exposing the superficial quality of so much liberal piousness. But even this dynamic turns out to be little more than a replay of a story at least as old as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, with George Peppard playing a penurious aspiring writer unhappily receiving support from an older lady. To this, Dreams adds the seemingly irresistible contemporary elements of border crossings, deportations, and even a few Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer characters, but the film’s indictment of immigration enforcement is not only tendentious but toothless next to the far more dynamic work of left-wing agitprop, One Battle After Another.
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Fleetingly, Dreams looks like it might be turning into something slightly more rousing. When Fernando ditches Jennifer, she begins calling him nonstop with breathily delivered messages such as, “Fernando, where are you? I’m worried.” Even Fernando’s family in Mexico wonders about the inexplicable obsessiveness of his benefactor. At one point, she is told by his family to date someone her own age. At another, she is seen evilly slinking into the back of a limo following some fancy event at a San Francisco museum. Might it be too much to hope that Jennifer is a woman scorned who is descending into psychosis, a la Fatal Attraction? Chastain has compellingly played ruthless before. Hernandez is not an unappealing or entirely ineffective leading man. The film should have leaned into its tawdriness, not its sanctimony and certainly not its pretentiousness. Politics, as usual, ruins everything.
Alas, this is too much to hope. Instead, the film depends on a third-act plot twist that reveals Jennifer’s past kindnesses toward Fernando as counterfeit, and which Fernando uses as a pretext to exact a kind of slow-burning revenge on Jennifer. “Slow-burning,” though, is the operative word: Even when the increasingly volatile pair seem close to being at each other’s throats, the film’s chicly antiseptic atmosphere — the SMEG refrigerator, the orange slices on which Jennifer nibbles before falling into a raunchy reverie — suggests an advertisement for housewares more than an actual thriller. The film must imagine its denouement as some sort of commentary on oppressor and oppressed, but mostly, it’s just monotonous.
Peter Tonguette is the film critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.