Jessica Chastain and the bitter end of the American dream

Michel Franco's cinema is the visual equivalent of the phrase “I'm not racist/sexist/classist, but…” Addicted to strong themes, the Mexican director tries (or believes) to find the right distance so that the controversies he stages are imbued with shades of gray. However, when it comes down to it, he almost always lets slip a gesture that reveals his satisfaction at being a provocateur, or a plot twist that condemns the most disadvantaged. It must be said, however, that considering the unhealthy precedents, Dreams relatively easily places itself at the upper end of his filmography. This is because for a good part of the running time, Franco allows the faces and bodies of his actors to express themselves: the relationship between the wealthy American philanthropist played by Jessica Chastain and the virtuoso Mexican dancer she patronizes is driven by a genuine desire that crystallizes in carnal choreographies. In these moments, the film manages to prevent the clear allegory about the balance of power and dependence between the nations represented by the protagonists from crushing the human scale of the effects. But in the universe of the author of Nuevo orden, good things never last long, and the narrative advances with deterministic resignation to bring out the worst in human nature and punish characters whom, for a naive moment, we had believed the director considered something more than an instrument for his thesis.