Exploring the Berlin Film Festival: A Cinematic Journey in the Land of Dreams

And now, Michel Franco invites us to dream a little dream. To risk being overly self-referential, it’s always been intriguing to consider what Franco himself dreams of. Compared to noteworthy directors working today, his work especially looks back to the 00’s era of Haneke and von Trier, when arthouse cinema revelled in shock and sadism. With largely favourable results, he’s surely been chasing those aforementioned filmmakers’ stature his whole career. Jessica Chastain, his new internationally famous lead performer after Tim Roth, also counts Isabelle Huppert and The Piano Teacher as major inspirations. So, it seems a collaboration forged in aligned sensibilities.

Dreams is another brilliantly controlled drama from Franco, but which still exhibits some of his worst tendencies of overstatement and sensationalism. Beyond this, it’s uncanny how many of his features are concerned with love: love within families, between generations, and across barriers of social class. Jennifer (Chastain) and Fernando (real-life ballet dancer Isaac Hernández) are his latest lovers, the former a wealthy, well-intentioned San Francisco philanthropist, with her beau a highly talented dancer she meets through one of her community-building projects in Mexico City. Conventions of love stories in cinema always require obstacles: their romance pivots between being genuine, and coldly transactional for them mutually, with Fernando wanting to share a life with her in California, whilst Jennifer would prefer the relationship remained beyond the US’s southern border, and only at her occasional convenience.

The tension spikes as Fernando illegally crosses the border, via highly dangerous means (the film’s opening shots inaugurate several more disturbing sequences of confinement). Once in San Francisco, they can’t seamlessly integrate into one another’s lives, and the stakes are heightened when Jennifer begins pursuing the resistant Fernando himself, making him seem like less of a disempowered interloper and potential antagonist .

Even though the film has its sweet and optimistic moments (and Franco’s last feature Memory ended up privileging this tonal mixture), your stomach is tensed for a tragic, or just cathartic end. And while it packs a wallop, the means by which its achieved feel manipulative and unsubtle, leaving the audience in a defeatist mode and a bit condescended to. But, if Franco is willingly manufacturing bitter medicine, it misses the point to wish it tasting better.

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If we want to put our critical eye again on the Berlinale’s curatorial strategies, we could say this edition includes a more intriguing mainland Chinese title (Vivian Qu’s Girls on Wire), and a far less sexy one (Huo Meng’s Living the Land); recalling the likes of So Long My Son, Return to Dust and the Golden Bear-winning Tuya’s Marraige, its selections from this national cinema are always starchier and more sober than what Cannes offers.

Otherwise, Huo’s film does assert itself as a confident and muscular entry into the cycle of Chinese familial and social dramas, even if it doesn’t distinguish itself against the most memorable of this form. Given the filmmaker’s birth year in 1984, his film’s setting 1991, and the presence of a likely surrogate figure for him in the pre-teen character Chuang, Living the Land gains credence as something highly personal, and an outlet for Huo to offer the particularities of his perspective on China’s history. The story is also pressured and informed by the contextual importance of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the colossal economic growth that was to further transform the country as it reached the new millennium.