‘Dreams’ review: Jessica Chastain’s socialite toys with ballet dancer

Mexican writer-director Michel Franco (“Memory”) explores dynamics of money, class and the border through the spiky, unsettling erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican ballet dancer and actor.

In the languidly paced movie, Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment with wielding the power at their fingertips against each other. The film examines the push-pull of attraction and rejection on a scope that’s both intimate and global, finding the uneasy space where the two meet.

Chastain stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco does not center on her experience, but that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we meet first escaping from the back of a box truck filled with migrants crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. He’s abandoned in San Antonio on a 100-degree day.

His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is the lap of luxury: a modernist San Francisco mansion where he makes himself at home and where he’s clearly been before. A talented ballet dancer who has already once been deported, he’s risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, though, as a high-profile figure, she’d rather keep her affair with Fernando under wraps. He’s her dirty little secret but he’s also a human being who refuses to be kept in the shadows.

As Jennifer and Fernando attempt to navigate what it looks like for them to be together, it seems that larger forces will shatter their connection. In reality, the only real danger is each other.

The storytelling logic of “Dreams” is predicated on watching these characters move through space, the way we watch dancers do. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose the wildly varying experiences of Fernando and Jennifer — he almost dies of thirst and heat stroke; she arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but both enter empty homes alone, melancholy. During a rift in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel, drinking red wine out of plastic cups with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer’s calls, while she eats alone in her darkened dining room, sipping out of crystal.

These comparisons aren’t exactly nuanced but they are stark and, for most of the film, Franco just asks us to watch them move together and apart, in a strange, avoidant pas de deux. Often dwarfed by architecture, their distinctive bodies in space are more important than the sparse dialogue that only serves to fill in crucial gaps in storytelling.

Cinematographer Yves Cape captures it all in crisp, saturated images. The lack of musical score (beyond diegetic music in the ballet scenes) contributes to the dry, flat affect and tone, as these characters enact increasing cruelties — both emotional and physical — upon each other as a means of trying to contain each other, until it escalates into something truly dark and disturbing.

Franco loses the plot of “Dreams” in the third act. What is a rather staid drama about the weight of social expectations on a relationship becomes a dramatically unexpected game of vengeance as Jennifer and Fernando grasp at any power they have over the other. She fetishizes him and he returns the favor, violently.

Ultimately, Franco jettisons his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling only icky. These events aren’t illuminating and feel instead like a bleak betrayal. The circumstances of the story might be timely, but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and liberty. Anything it suggests we already know.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.