by Hudson Moura
Dreams, written and directed by Michel Franco, stages romance as a mechanism of class power, where intimacy becomes indistinguishable from possession. Fernando (Isaac Hernández), a gifted ballet dancer on scholarship in Mexico City, is supported by a foundation whose patroness is a wealthy benefactor Jennifer (Jessica Chastain). Their relationship begins in her Mexico City apartment, but the plot sharpens when Fernando decides to immigrate to the United States and join her in San Francisco. What might read, in another film, as a story of artistic ascent quickly reveals itself as a story of dependency and control: she wants him close, but not visible—kept private from family and friends, insulated from the social world in which appearances must remain intact.
Fernando chooses autonomy at the worst possible moment: he lives on his own without legal status, vulnerable to deportation at any time. Yet the film insists on the paradox that structures their bond: for Jennifer, life without him is intolerable, but life with him must be curated. She begins to intrude, to reassert proximity as entitlement, interfering in his daily existence until he returns to her orbit. The move back into her home leads to a temporary consolidation of his success—he becomes a teacher and leading dancer within the San Francisco ballet world—yet his lack of legal status remains the knife at the edge of every scene. As her family’s criticisms intensify and his professional rise attracts jealousy, she tries to preserve her world of appearances and reclaims exclusive control over the terms of their intimacy.
The film’s sharpest insight is how wealth manufactures a sense of invincibility. Jennifer’s affluence is not simply a background condition. It is a ritualized apparatus, staged through imposing material signs: chauffeur-driven cars, galas, ballet performances, luxury interiors, and an aesthetic of untouchability that translates social power into bodily sovereignty. Franco frames these rituals as a lived ideology. Extreme wealth produces detachment from consequence and from otherness; it authorizes manipulation; it renders another person’s life negotiable. In this world, “love” collapses into possession—control disguised as devotion, care performed as entitlement.
Formally, Dreams mirrors this violence of class through a stripped, raw style. The photography is often deliberately dull, allowing wealth to “shine” not through warmth but through architecture, costume, and spatial separation; luxury stands out as a bright surface against a drained emotional field. Music is almost absent, leaving dramatic intensity to the actors’ bodies, faces, and timing. This restraint concentrates the film’s ethical discomfort: scenes are not softened by sentiment or aesthetic consolation.
However, the film’s treatment of this wealth is marked by a revealing distance. Franco tends to film privilege from afar—observing its rituals and surfaces with a cool remove rather than immersing the spectator in its seductions. As a result, the camera’s alignment appears closer to Fernando’s Mexican perspective, and to the precarious position from which he is forced to read Jennifer’s world, than to Jennifer’s own experiential interiority. This is striking because Jennifer is, in practical terms, the narrative’s primary conductor: she sets the terms, controls access, and ultimately determines the couple’s fate. Yet the film rarely lets wealth register as a fully inhabited “world” with its own self-justifying logic; it remains something placed on screen, not something the mise-en-scène allows us to occupy from within. In that sense, Dreams critiques privilege effectively, but it does so from a position that never quite identifies with—or fully explains—the social ecosystem it stages, suggesting that this sphere of wealth is less Jennifer’s lived world than an apparatus she wields.
Isaac Hernández is especially compelling—his physical credibility as a dancer and his Spanish-speaking presence ground Fernando’s vulnerability without reducing him to innocence. The result is a film that is less interested in romance than in domination: an unsparing portrait of how privilege can convert desire into ownership, and how the language of love can become one more instrument for denying another person’s individuality and becomes our ideally object of desire and satisfaction.
Rating: 3.2/5