Mexican director Michel Franco returns with a chilly, angrily intense and deeply pessimistic tale of erotic obsession among the liberal super-rich in Trump’s US who seek to launder and redeem their guilt by sponsoring the arts. It’s a really involving picture which beckons you hypnotically towards the tacit promise of a sensationally unhappy and violent denouement, and of course Franco is unlikely to deliver any other kind. The two final plot developments are shocking, if not precisely surprising, and in fact vulnerable to the charge of being crudely obvious – but Franco certainly gives us a gripping emotional drama, supercharged with toxic sensuality and fear.
Jessica Chastain plays Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy woman based in San Francisco extensively accustomed to high-end restaurants, couture, private planes and chauffeur-driven SUVs and Franco has an eye for the luxury-porn scenarios familiar from TV dramas such as Succession and The White Lotus, though with a more dyspeptic and fearful edge.
Jennifer’s full-time job is administering various high-minded arts projects made possible by the colossally wealthy endowment set up by her widowed father Michael (Marshall Bell); her more unreflective brother Jake (Rupert Friend) manages other parts of the fund. She is always to be seen walking, with various attendant functionaries, through the architecturally vast modernist lobbies of galleries and theatres that her dad’s money has bankrolled. One of Jennifer’s projects is a dance school in Mexico City where she has met and had a passionate fling with ballet star Fernando (played by real-life dancer Isaac Hernández) and rather tactlessly left him a lot of cash before she left.
Fernando uses that money to get over the border into Texas as an illegal and then hitches to San Francisco to see Jennifer who is overwhelmed with the transgressive, erotic excitement of a star-crossed romance.
Yet Fernando himself, disclosing a proud and prickly personality, is upset when Jennifer won’t be seen with him in public with her grand friends. As for Jennifer, she is furious and excluded when he chats with Mexican-immigrant waiters in Spanish — she herself can only speak with Mexicans through her phone’s Google translate app: absurdist moments that reveal unthinking arrogance. At first Fernando has all the power by withdrawing haughtily from her and retreating as she obsessively and woundedly follows him and Franco lets us suspect some kind of grisly Ruth Ellis situation.
But what exactly is it that Jennifer imagines for them both in the long term? Marriage would solve Fernando’s problems as an illegal, and Jennifer is divorced, something that may or may not have something to do with an inability to have children. Remarriage might affect her position in the family estate – and remarriage to a Mexican, someone whom the family is prepared to countenance as one of their artist serfs, would be something else again.
Franco shows us a panorama of hidden cruelty and racism, and shows us the condescension involved in super-rich arts patronage, of which the slumming excitement of wealth-gap sex is a part, perhaps even a kind of kink. In so far as they think about the art they subsidise, the McCarthy family solemnly believe that their Mexicans are artistic because they are alienated and poor, a picturesque underclass of talent on their doorstep – close and maybe too close. It is quite a vision: mordant, satirical, brutal.
• Dreams screened at the Berlin film festival.
