Michel Franco’s “Dreams” is an erotically themed character study that’s centered on the relationship between a scion of American old money, Jennifer (Jessica Chastain), and a younger Mexican dancer, Fernando (Isaac Hernández), who is trying to attain American citizenship and a position in a studio in San Francisco. Eager to push buttons, Franco has fashioned their backstory into an essay on the gulf of power that separates a white titan from the persecuted person of color that she objectifies. Think “Babygirl” with America’s immigration policies kneaded into the May-December kink, and you’re in the ballpark.
It works up more heat than “Babygirl” though.
There is a scene that involves Chastain delivering the kind of blunt and unusually specific dialogue that you’d never expect to hear in a mainstream movie at all, let alone from an Oscar winner. And a hungry bout on a flight of stairs is authentically steamy, suggesting the improvisations of real sex and the heightened porniness of erotic thrillers.
But “Dreams” also has that “Babygirl” problem of wanting to be good for you.
It can’t merely be an erotic thriller, of course. It must be about how Jennifer is a rich liberal hypocrite who utilizes her foundations as a means of control, with Fernando as a blend of sex worker and pet. She is always unmistakably in charge yet gets off on pretending to submit to him. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that premise, but Franco establishes the contours of this relationship and continually repeats the same reductive character information throughout the movie. Franco invites you to half tune out and congratulate yourself for watching a sex thriller with “more on its mind.”
A movie that seduced you into enjoying an affair between a rich white American and a struggling Mexican should be uncomfortable. It should make you think about how you’re potentially turned on by material that is built on exploitation. And then your guilt might be complicated by the fact that the wielder of power in this movie is a woman, a plot turn that might land awkwardly given our climate of endless and mostly unpunished evil as perpetuated by wealthy men.
Franco intends for all that stuff to be floating around in “Dreams,” and, occasionally, when the movie allows itself to be erotic, these meanings come to life. Often, though, it’s another airless art movie. Rather than potentially confound you with the implications of his fantasy, Franco bores you with obvious editorialization. Like most modern erotic thrillers, “Dreams” wants points for being provocative yet is afraid of itself. It’s afraid that you will read it the wrong way and be offended and get it in trouble on TikTok or whatever.
It is also one of those movies that wears scant characterization as a badge of integrity, mistaking a lack of imagination for ambiguity. As Jennifer and Fernando drift through impeccably symmetrical frames, we savor the nice architecture and the dancing and the artwork on the walls, submitting to the pregnant slowness of the story while awaiting titillation like Pavlov’s dogs might for a treat.
Jennifer has a father (Marshall Bell) and a brother (Rupert Friend), and while Bell gives this powerful man suggestions of mystery and nuance, Friend’s entitled douche is around much more often to score easy points on the rich. Fernando’s family, predictably virtuous, appears for a few scenes to little effect. It’s difficult to parse Jennifer’s objectification of Fernando from Franco’s. Of course that’s intentional, but so what?
Nevertheless, many movies offer much less than intricate art-movie compositions and gorgeous actors dressed to the nines. Chastain is so sexy that she nearly gets around the script’s shortcomings. She is not afraid to be unlikeable either, refusing to wink at the audience. Hernández has less to do, as “Dreams” is another deconstruction of white privilege that is itself drunk on said privilege, but he gives Fernando intriguingly self-contained qualities. He allows you to sense Fernando’s resentment at being on the bottom rung of the ladder that is the modern American shit-show.
For a certain kind of person, Alex Ross Perry’s 173-minute, docu-essay “Videoheaven” is going to be, well, you know. More specifically, the kind of person who sees the disappearance of video stores as an embodiment of the erosion of community that grips modern society. Perry is too elegant to spell that theme out, but yearning runs through “Videoheaven,” serving as a beacon to heartbroken cinephiles.
The running time is part of the spell, as the movie functions as an equivalent of a video store. Voiceover, delivered in empathetic tones by Maya Hawke, gives up the game, saying that video stores now only exist via their depictions in media. Smashing together countless clips from movies and TV shows, Perry fashions the closest thing we have to a portal to a past dimension, and once there we’re allowed to linger.
People drawn to this kind of movie aren’t people who were once known for dashing in and out of a video store in a handful of minutes on the way to Pilates. Inhabiting the store was an experience that was intimately connected to but distinct from the movies on the shelves. It was a way for cinephiles to wander and live amongst the movies before picking what to watch in their own domain, and to fraternize with their own kind. There is an intrinsic human need to get together and bullshit over marginalia, whether it’s movies or books or TV or sports or music. The hubs for this bonding are disappearing, and no one will ever convince me that social media is an adequate substitute.
Working from Daniel Herbert’s 2014 book, “Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store,” Perry fashions a work of scholarship that traces the rise and fall of video stores and the sociopolitical matrices that influenced their birth and death. Initially quite expensive and mostly for professionals, VHS tapes took off in the 1980s, changing the relationship that we have with movies that were once only available in theaters.
Perry is most interested in the video store as a cultural ecosphere. He’s dizzyingly specific about social rituals that you may have forgotten — whether it’s the cliché of the video clerk as all-knowing and weirdly intimidating nerd, or the ballyhoo over the porn in the backroom. He differentiates mom-and-pop stores from corporate hives that had censoriously limited selections, bright lights and ubiquitous advertising. This distinction is refreshing given the misguided nostalgia that now animates talk of Blockbuster. Companies like that were the beginning of the end for a brand of consumerism that at its best favored oddball owners peddling esoterica.
History and fetishization complement one another in “Videoheaven.” For instance, Perry outlines how video stores, as shown in movies, went from seamy and dangerous places to glorified theme parks. I had no idea that Brian de Palma’s 1984 erotic thriller “Body Double,” which I adore, was the first portrayal of a commercial video store in a movie.
Perry is alive to de Palma’s sleek and transfixing aesthetics, and to how a social innovation passes first through a gauntlet of anxiety on its way to mainstream status, before eventual irrelevance. He prompted me to consider all that in a matter of seconds while reminding me that I had an out-of-print Blu-ray of “Body Double” that needs another spin. The density of Perry’s associations astonishes.
At the root of “Videoheaven” is the visceral need to roam around in video stores again. And Perry, who once worked at the iconic Kim’s Video in New York City, satiates it as much as anyone in his situation could. Perry’s taste in clips is democratic, favoring disreputable genre items and obscure ephemera over low-hanging fruit. The footage also illuminates Perry himself. An 1980s-era horror movie, “Video Violence,” and a primer on the “Kidprint” service that was available at Blockbuster suggest how Perry’s disturbing short horror film, “Kidprint,” came into fruition.
There hasn’t been a fictional feature film from Perry since the raw and extraordinary rock star addiction movie “Her Smell” from 2018. Perry has since set himself up as a custodian of the analogue past, though “Kidprint” suggests that he’s on the cusp of a resurgence. Until then, the massive and wounded “Videoheaven” and the abrupt and nasty “Kidprint” offer a double feature on the ecstasy and danger of worshipping the past.
If only you could find them at a video store.
“Dreams” is now playing at Movieland. “Videoheaven” is rentable and will be available on the Criterion Channel starting March 1st.
