Mohit Ramchandani’s City Of Dreams is, in actuality, a cinema of nightmares. Or, more accurately, a cinematic nightmare. The film — which follows a young Mexican teenager’s miserable journey from his home country to the the miserable existence of a Los Angeles sweatshop — tries its damnedest to be an experiential exposé of child slavery — a low-wattage, though no less ostentatiously directed, Slumdog Millionaire, if you will, about those who would cross the U.S.-Mexico border for a shot to fulfill their American dreams. But in execution the film comes across as nothing more than a showreel for cinematographer Alejandro Chávez (who served as an additional camera operator on Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, but otherwise seems to have spent most of his time studying the most flamboyant camerawork Emmanuel Lubezki with Alejandro González Iñárritu) and Ramchandani’s over-cranked shooting sensibilities.
In theory, the elaborate long takes employed here and the striking low-angle POV shots of our child protagonist, Jesús (Ari Lopez), getting beaten, chased, and beaten again by one stereotypical Mexican human trafficker, then another stereotypical Mexican sweatshop operator, could be soul-crushingly realistic; increased shot duration and repeated subjective shots can, again, at least, in theory, convince us that we are Jesús. But here, that risk of association between viewer and subject is never even breached, let alone achieved (or questioned). The film’s utterly hollow characterization of not only Jesús but every other character in his vicinity denies its hyper-aestheticization any value; if anything, the lack of character specificity only further reveals City Of Dreams’ baroque visual style to be a crass appropriation of Jesús’ misery in a bid for critical adulation and commercial success. The fundamental irony of City of Dreams, then is that whole thing reflects, if not literally then at least metaphorically, an act of opportunism and exploitation on par with what Ramchandani seems to want to critique, but fails to do convincingly.
DIRECTOR: Mohit Ramchandani; CAST: Ari Lopez, Renata Vaca, Alfredo Castro, Paulina Gaitán, Jason Patric; DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions; IN THEATERS: August 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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