Yann Gonzalez | Land of My Dreams / 2012

strange projections of sexual allure and love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yann Gonzalez (screenwriter and director) Land of My Dreams / 2012 [21 minutes]

 

A clearly itinerant woman, wheeling her suitcase behind her, stops in a barbershop to get a trim and hair wash. The owner tells her that he only trims men’s hair, but still allows her entry and washes and shampoos her beautiful blonde hair.

     The woman, Bianca (Julie Brémond) next walks the Porto, Portugal beach strangely encountering the mother (Paul Guedes) who she apparently has not seen for a long while.

     They immediately bond, the mother suggesting her daughter join up with her for the traveling strip shows she does out of her trailer.

   What follows in this work by the innovative and often controversial French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez, is a very strange experience that is difficult to completely assimilate or simply to comprehend.

    The daughter first strips, the mother acting almost as a whip-toting carnival barker, in front of a small audience of males. The mother passes a hat where each man puts in a few coins. For a few Euros men are even promised that they can go up and touch her breasts and other body parts. The mostly older men pant and lust over her body, while one young boy (Luis Feilipe Rodrigues) pays the Euros to be able to go up and touch her breasts.

      At least now they can properly dine, and the mother suggests before the next show, her daughter go out and explore the city.

      Bianca does, encountering, as she later tells her mother that she  a handsome young musician (Hugo Alfredo Gomes) first on the street, and then in a small grassy plot where the two have passionate sex, the mother clearly approving of the once-in-a-life time romance that can never be experienced again.

      But the intense kisses she soon after plants on her daughters lips are clearly not from motherly-love but from a lesbian incestuous love.

      The second performance of their now mutual strip-tease is desultory to say the least, particularly when the daughter sees her new lover in the audience, he soon after turning away in disappointment and disgust.

       Her mother can only promise her a special performance at midnight which they intend to give for free. In a wooded, almost jungle-like spot, the two perform for men that first appear simply as shadows before gathering, standing in a group like the other attendees while time openly masturbating themselves, some in their pants, others taking out and displaying their cocks.

       Gonzalez is brother to musician Anthony Gonzalez of the M83 group, and the music in this short work, as in many of his others, is essential to its meaning. But what does it all mean?

        I basically agree with the Letterboxd commentator who signs in with the moniker “_Csil.” He or she writes:

 

“From what he's said in interviews, I don't think I'm missing the point when I say that it was Anna Domino's hypnotic neon video that inspired Land of my Dreams, not just her music. Lynch would love the quiet, delirious eroticism of this clip, and I think Yann just wanted to see this blonde undress and dance even more in this blue dream, so he set up a caravan outside Porto, also borrowed from Lynch, in front of which Bianca dances and undresses on a provisional stage, with the most beautiful breasts in the world, which poor and hungry men can touch for 5 euros, until night falls and the final erotic performance becomes something else. It is hard to say how the incestuous thread came into play, Bianca's strange relationship with the older woman who calls herself her mother and who presents and celebrates these striptease performances, but I think all this is just poetic motifs in a deeply cinematic dream, because Bianca's increasingly frightened dance in front of the predatory gaze of men who are more greedy at night is rather a reflection of the impossibility of real love, as the witch says, something that cannot be maintained in the present, that will never be yours, only a memory that had an original for a moment.

     In the fragrant spring night, an unexpectedly evil wind rises and tears at Bianca's veil. It swirls wildly, bringing with it the damp breath of the storm. I rise and close the window. The melancholy of the experience of passing love pervades this strange little cinema, which, despite all its underdeveloped elements and clumsiness, you can't take your eyes off, which captivates you from the first frame to the last, even if at the end you are left with the curious question of what it was all about—but you can see that one of the main characteristics of this wave called post-cinema is that it puts this question in brackets. And if you accept its autonomy and hypnotic visuality, a new set of questions slowly emerges.”

 

    I would simply summarize that Gonzalez is devoted here, as in so many of his works, to presenting what others find as “hideous,” strange projections of sexual allure and love outside of the standard heteronormative vision.

 

Los Angeles, July 22, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).