Jessica Chastain-led 'Dreams' is a Mexican-US toxic love story

By Hanna Rantala

BERLIN, Feb 15 (Reuters) - Mexican director Michel Franco's "Dreams" began with a fraught love story that grew into a wider narrative about the tense ties between Mexico and the United States, he said on Saturday.

For the film, with U.S. star Jessica Chastain and Mexican newcomer Isaac Hernandez, "the point of departure was the toxic relationship between these two characters," Franco told Reuters ahead of its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival.

"Dreams," Franco's second time working with the Oscar-winning Chastain following the drama "Memory," is competing against 18 other films for the festival's Golden Bear top prize.

"They truly love each other, but the different places they're coming from makes it that their best intentions are not fulfilled," he said, which then provided a larger canvas for looking at how Mexico and the U.S. relate.

Chastain stars as Jennifer, a U.S. socialite who has fallen in love with Fernando, a Mexican ballet dancer portrayed by real-life world-renowned dancer Hernandez in his first film role.

Fernando makes the perilous journey across the border to be with Jennifer, only for his arrival to disrupt her carefully curated existence.

The uneasy relationship between the two countries is "always a central theme" for Mexicans because they are aware from an early age how emigrants are mistreated in the U.S., said Franco.

Chastain, who lives in the U.S., said it was important to find hope, however difficult, wherever one's home is.

"You have to participate to create the environment, the culture, the society that you want," she told a news briefing on Saturday when asked whether the United States was still the land of dreams.