Jessica Chastain gives one of the gutsiest performances of her career in Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” here as a San Francisco philanthropist in love with a younger, undocumented Mexican immigrant whom she’s convinced to cross over into the United States.
Emotionally lobotomized by her wealthy scion father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend), Jennifer (Chastain) gives money to good causes and believes she’s contributing to some greater good. Meanwhile, Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking feature film debut), a 10-plus-years-younger ballet dancer from Mexico City, is at her every mercy trying to start a life in America after a harrowing journey over the border.
The characters may function metaphorically as stand-ins for the U.S. and Mexico and how those countries, like these people, need each other. But politics aside, what makes the “New Order” director’s latest film, and his second with Chastain after the dementia-addled romance “Memory,” throb and thrum beneath the filmmaking’s cool detachment is the messed-up love story at its core.
“Dreams,” which shot on location in San Francisco in 2023 during the SAG-AFTRA strike on an interim waiver, deploys Franco’s usual style of all scenes unfolding in one take, and with limited rehearsal. The acquisitions title premiered at the Berlinale in competition this week, where IndieWire sat down with the director and star to talk about making this tricky and upsetting film, which, with the right distributor, is poised to be among 2025’s most controversial films. It’s already among the most acclaimed films in the Berlin competition, where the jury is headed up by Todd Haynes. They will want to recognize this scorching film, which has a wounding doozy of an ending, somehow.
Chastain’s recent films, including her Oscar-winning “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” often contain a redemptive, feminist streak. Not so in this hopeless movie, though Chastain makes the case that Jennifer is more feminist than you might realize.
“I think she’s the product of patriarchy because she’s been born and raised and learned about love in a family where the father makes all the decisions and the brother makes all the decisions, and they treat her as a child who can’t take care of herself,” Chastain told IndieWire at the Grand Hyatt in Potsdamer Platz, just before the movie premiered a few hours later. “At the museum, the father introduces the brother with all his accomplishments, and then goes, ‘My beautiful daughter, Jennifer, who has been by my side since college.’ So she’s a pet. So I think that is a case for feminism because look what it does to us women who are not treated as equals.”
Director Franco has faced controversy in his home country of Mexico and in the States for his dark portraits of sociopolitical identity. For instance, with “New Order,” he received backlash for casting the uprisers in an apocalyptic social revolt against the One Percent as perceivably more dark-skinned than their lighter-skinned oppressors, perpetuating for some the idea that brown people in Mexico are poor and savage.
“I don’t need to be liked as a filmmaker, for people to think, ‘Oh, he’s a good person.’ I have no trouble about that. I am more interested in representing life,” he said. “What’s going on between the two countries and what Mexicans and immigrants are living in the States on a daily basis is much more dramatic than even what we portrayed [in ‘Dreams’]. So I wasn’t shy about that. The main thing is it’s true love. That’s what makes it work, that they are in love, and that’s why it’s tragic.”
You could argue that Franco’s filmography of late began to take a turn toward the more hopeful, as “Memory” cast Jessica Chastain as a care worker falling into a romance with Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), a former high-school classmate with dementia, whose life is constantly refreshing due to memory loss each day.
“I am interested in love stories, but not a love story by design. Even the end of ‘Memory’ is a challenging one,” Franco said. “It’s hopeful because it’s satisfying the audience because there’s some hope in the characters together, but you imagine the rest of their lives, and it’s very challenging.”
“You can imagine in 10 minutes, he turns to her and says, ‘Hi, my name’s Saul.’ That’s why we like to work together,” Chastain said.
The idea for “Dreams” began with Chastain’s character possibly being a man before the idea of the age-gap romance between Jennifer and Fernando emerged. “And then you were like. ‘Maybe they’re lesbians!’ There’s a lot of different directions we went in,” Chastain said.
But it’s when they met the 34-year-old Isaac Hernández, a Mexican-immigrant ballet dancer trained at the American Ballet Theater and now working in the Bay Area, that the core of “Dreams” fell into place.
“He did a TV show and a dance movie. The dance movie wasn’t so satisfying. I believe that he did a TV show where he’s also dancing,” Franco said. “When I decided he would act on the film, I went to see him on that 10,000-people show, and before the show, he came out with a microphone and, he said, to 10,000 people, in Spanish, ‘Hi,’ very shy, ‘I’ve never done this before the show begins, I want to thank you all for being here. It’s such a personal project. My heart is…,’ and I’m like, ‘Bullshit artist!’ And I look around and everyone’s already crying before the show. He’s such an actor that he already has everyone [crying]. Then I told him, that bullshit thing you did, you knew you were doing it. He said he’d already done it in Monterey, or I don’t know where.”
“I have had a little difficulty because some people are like, ‘Oh the age gap,’” Chastain said. “It’s [only] a little over a decade, and now I’m feeling like I’m 60 years old. We met the day before we started shooting. We met for breakfast and, immediately, I called [Michel] and said, ‘He’s lying about his age.’ There is no way this man is 34 years old. He’s a teenager! There’s no way.”
Franco added, “One day on set, a Mexican extra, a woman, came to me, and said, ‘It’s fantastic that you’re giving your son such a great opportunity.’”
“Dreams” makes an impression with a number of volatile sex scenes between the actors, where Hernandez’s skill as a ballet dancer becomes even more obvious in the way he hoists Chastain, throwing her onto a bed or on a stairwell.
“The scene I am most complimented about is the staircase, and that was Jessica’s idea,” Franco said.
“[The way it] was written, it was supposed to be in the living room. The living room is pure sunlight. There’s windows everywhere, and the camera, you can’t cut to anything. Where can we film this?” Chastain said.
Actors on a Franco movie do little rehearsal, though that was required for the explosive scene in which Fernando, after Jennifer has broken up with him out of the shame of being seen together by her father’s colleagues, takes her physically and erotically by surprise once again. Think Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher” in terms of loaded, two-sided debasement. And it’s all hurtling toward one of the bleakest Franco endings ever. (“You didn’t tell me [the ending] until you decided he was going to be a ballet dancer,” Chastain said.)
Chastain added, “We did a lot of rehearsal for the sex scenes, for the intimate scenes. In all honesty, the stairwell scene, I said, here’s the reality: I am making a movie with a professional ballet dancer. I don’t want to be naked throughout this movie along with a naked ballet dancer. We don’t need that image. So how do we block it in a way that’s still super sexy and talks about their need for each other?”
Franco said he and Chastain are already at work on an idea for a third collaboration. “I am glad that we are friends, so I don’t have to pitch her anything. We are talking because I want to see what it triggers in her. Last week, we were talking, and she said she has an idea, and we are going to work on it. So it goes both ways,” Franco said.
“I can’t play a racist again,” Chastain hinted. “We’ve got to change it up.”
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