“Dreams”, an interview with director Michel Franco

Mexican director Michel Franco was in Karlovy Vary to present his Berlin-premiered, latest film, “Dreams“, where Jessica Chastain (already starring, in a diametrically opposite role, in his previous movie, “Memory“) plays a rich American woman who enjoys an affair with an enamoured, talented, and undocumented young Mexican ballet dancer (Isaác Hernández) whom she doesn’t seem able to really let into her wealthy benefactress world.

It seems difficult not to immediately consider “Dreams” within the context the filmmaker’s body of work, for however very distinctive each new film he makes always is, since his petrifying debut “Daniel & Ana” (2009), each one also adds new layers and complexities to his often merciless and calmly drastic oeuvre, which makes it a rather vertiginous echo chamber. One of the many things “Dreams” brings in is, with Fernando, ‘a strong character [who] loves [Jessica Chastain‘s character], but he’s got dignity, so if the relationship is not on equal terms, he’s not interested in being with her. And of course I’m Mexican so in a way, I wanted to build a character who is full of dignity, and talented and brave, but also a real character who, at some point in the film, makes mistakes.‘

We discuss the irreconcilable distances between Jennifer and Fernando, and especially her inability to escape the vertical, exploitative system of relationships she is used to, and confortable in, which makes her unable to relate to him, as an individual, on an even plainfield.

Asked about the house in this film (houses being one of the spaces he likes to explore in his films), Franco also underlines the strict divide between private and public life Chastain‘s character never manages to abolish, and suggests that despite her maintained aloofness, she is ‘lonely and sad’ living this ‘double life’, being unable to break away from a privileged world where, when all is said and done, she does not really have ‘her own voice, and she’s bossed around by the men in her family.‘

Following this argument in ‘defense’ of a character whose radical act of betrayal seems nevertheless unforgivable, echoing other immoral, despicable deeds in Franco filmography, whether collective – like in the Cannes-awarded, gripping “After Lucia” (2012) or, very differently, “New Order” (2020), which floored its first viewers in Venice and bagged the Grand Jury Prize – or individual – “April’s Daughter” vividly comes to mind –, the conversation veers towards the satisfying quality, for the viewer, of revenge as a response to such foul acts in many of Franco‘s films.

Answering a question about the fact that a viewer’s mind struggles to even conceive the inhumanity and violence (physical or other) often depicted in them, so inexorable it sometimes eclipses the tenderness and kindness also present in his stories – for instance in “Chronic” (2015) and “Sundown” (2021), both starring Tim Roth –, so much so that it tends to want this violence to be purely fictional and hypothetical, Michel Franco is categorical: what he is interested in portraying is, ‘unfortunately, the reality of the world.’

‘Some people have absolute freedom […], but most people don’t enjoy these privileges. That’s the world, and I think that’s why people are upset everywhere, because of the social disparity. There are A class citizens [and] people having nothing, not even the minimum rights guaranteed. In the case of Mexico and the States, it’s very dramatic, because we see that on a huge border, and Mexico is treated like a backyard, and immigrants and Mexicans who support the American economy are not acknowledged and not treated in a respectful way in most cases.‘

As it were, the strong impact of the filmmaker films may very well stem for the painful perception, on the part of the viewer, of the cruel contradiction between the evident humanism in them and this implacable lucidity, at least when it comes to a certain part of humankind.

‘The films and books that interest me, always, are those which don’t shy away from the dark side of human behaviour, which we can witness it without much effort: it’s everywhere, unfortunately. […] I am more interested in a cinema that shows a little bit of who we are than in the silly fantasy of what we should be, without any true learning of who we are. […] If we live in such a troubled world, it is because we keep failing as human beings.‘

Plot