Jessica Chastain delivers one of the most daring performances of her career in Michel Franco’s latest film, “Dreams.” The movie portrays Chastain as a San Francisco philanthropist, Jennifer, who becomes romantically entangled with Fernando, a younger, undocumented Mexican immigrant she persuades to cross the border into the United States.[2]A Complex Love Story

Emotionally stunted by her wealthy scion father (Marshall Bell) and brother (Rupert Friend), Jennifer believes she is contributing to a greater good through her philanthropic efforts. Meanwhile, Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking feature film debut), a 10-plus-years-younger ballet dancer from Mexico City, is at her mercy, trying to start a new life in America after a harrowing journey over the border.

Metaphorical Representation

The characters in “Dreams” can be seen as metaphorical stand-ins for the U.S. and Mexico, highlighting the interdependent nature of these countries. The film’s core is a deeply flawed love story, which drives the narrative beneath the cool detachment of the filmmaking.

Shot on location in San Francisco in 2023 during the SAG-AFTRA strike on an interim waiver, “Dreams” employs Franco’s signature style of all scenes unfolding in one take, with limited rehearsal. The film premiered at the Berlinale in Competition this week, where it has already garnered significant acclaim and is poised to be one of the most controversial films of 2025.

Feminist Undertones

Chastain’s recent films, including her Oscar-winning “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” often contain a redemptive, feminist streak. However, “Dreams” presents a different narrative. Chastain argues that Jennifer is more feminist than one might realize, stating, “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.”

“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.”

Jessica Chastain

Director’s Vision

Director Franco has faced controversy in his home country of Mexico and in the U.S. 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.

Franco, however, remains unfazed by criticism, stating, “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.”

“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.”

Michel Franco

Evolving Narratives

Franco’s recent filmography has taken a turn toward more hopeful narratives. For example, “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. 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.”

Michel Franco

Casting and Development

The idea for “Dreams” began with Chastain’s character possibly being a man before 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. The core of “Dreams” fell into place when they met Isaac Hernández, a Mexican-immigrant ballet dancer trained at the American Ballet Theater and now working in the Bay Area.

Franco recalled, “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. 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.’ 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.”

Jessica Chastain

Challenging Scenes and Future Collaborations

“Dreams” features several intense sex scenes between Chastain and Hernández, where Hernández’s skill as a ballet dancer is evident in the way he handles Chastain. Chastain revealed, “The scene I am most complimented about is the staircase, and that was Jessica’s idea.”

Chastain and Franco are already working on ideas for a third collaboration. Franco mentioned, “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.”

“I can’t play a racist again. We’ve got to change it up.”

Jessica Chastain