Land of My Dreams (2012) User Reviews

You Have to Start Somewhere

[zacknabo · 7/10 · 30 September 2016]

What to say about Yann Gonzalez? The term Lynchian has been thrown around…and well that is probably a bit strong. His knack for the grotesque is Jodoroworsky-ian, but there is the fact that this young French-Portuguese director who is more than willing to take risk visually and in content is just not "there" yet, though there are moments of undeniable potential. He is completely unafraid In Land of My Dreams, the last short film he made before his 2013 debut You and the Night, a mysterious young woman Bianca meets up with her estranged mother in Porto (no back-story). Together they will perform in a mobile strip show with Bianca as the main attraction. While Gonzalez has pieced together beautiful compositions, there is nothing much in the way of anything else. Yet, for the first ten minutes I have to admit I was fairly captivated in some unusual way. The dance scenes are as beautiful as they are extremely awkward. The mother and daughter put on a show in the middle of the day; the mother takes up the loose change of the male gawkers, until for five euros a young boy no more than 14 pays up to touch one of Bianca breast. Honestly, I don't know what I watched. It's a film that runs about 20 minutes and the first ten I sat nodding my head thinking "okay," yet when there is suddenly this incestuous moment between the mother and daughter in a restaurant after the daughter has admitted to her mother that she has had a powerful fling with a local artist, thus falling in love with him, a warning the mother specifically espoused. The kiss between mother and daughter felt like when Gaspar Noe trips over his own feet and you groan over a missed opportunity. The dirty-carnivalesque striptease does bring thoughts of Lynch in color (blue fog), dissonant, ambient sound (provided by M83), but not much else. Gonzalez doesn't give the viewer enough to feel much of anything, so all we are is lost; lost in Porto watching some girl strip for strangers, strip for petty cash, and strip to make her mother happy. In the final dance sequence at night, they put on their nightly show for the true vampires, vagabonds, degenerates, dark street urchins of the night that show up first as dark shadows, seemingly from nowhere or another world. It begins to rain, the daughter collapses sobbing in her mother's arms, sobbing; sobbing over her lost "love," her reconnection with her mother, the true repulsion she has for her occupation, the realization that time cannot be regained, or the fact that she is sadly (and rather quickly) becoming her mother? Your guess is as good as mine and probably better. If you see this as a show of sex as power and vice versa, I would have to disagree or at least comment that Gonzalez didn't do enough to bring the film in that direction. What I will say about this short and Yann Gonzalez in general, is that while the film is not good, it is a watch for cinephiles, because it appears in brief moments that Gonzalez does have a risk-takers mentality and a willingness to explore the (and his own) bounds of cinema and an eye for the erudite, the grotesque, the campy and the outright cinematographically stylishness that turns "that director" or "some director" into an "auteur." And if nothing else at least his feature length film is better.