Tribeca 2022: "Land of Dreams" Gives Sheila Vand The Star Turn She Has Been Deserving
Sunday, June 12, 2022 at 10:30AM by Jason Adams
A splendidly surreal spin on the immigrant experience, Land of Dreams stars the always-great Sheila Vand, best known as the burqa-rocking vampire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. In the new film she plays Simin, an Iranian-American artist turned census worker in the near-ish future.
She's been tasked with recording the dreams of the people the government’s keeping track of. Not dream as in “The American Dream,” not dream like, “One day I hope I will become a doctor.” But the actual literal dreams that these people dream as they sleep at night...
Simin asks, her marks recount, and she snaps a photograph for good measure. Co-directors Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari posit a world where the unwieldy American bureaucracy has managed to squirm its opprobrious tentacles into our final refuge, no doubt giving George Orwell’s corpse one last shudder in the process.
Not that Land of Dreams plays out like the sci-fi nightmare that skirts its idea’s edges, at least not for its majority anyway – this is a film of Jarmuschian quirk and desert-adjacent candy-colors straight out of Wim Wenders’ Paris Texas. And this is a film where each character after the other comes out in full capital letters.
If Neshat & Azari were big name directors the roles of the folks that Simin documents dream-wise would have been filled with big movie stars, with Tildas and Bill Murrays and Adam Drivers oh my. Lord knows pleasure is possible in that direction but I’m glad that we’re saddled with smaller character actors instead, because who doesn’t want to see Christopher McDonald, Anna Gunn, or the great Robin Bartlett get a moment to shine? They give the movie the left-of-center vibe it demands, and reinforce its themes of giving voice to the previously voiceless.
As Simin goes from house to house meeting and greeting these singular American citizens and recording their dreams for who knows what ultimate purpose, her artistic curiosity gets the better of her and she begins a little side-project on her own. When back at her roadside motel – the sort of roadside motel I am sure you can immediately picture from a million of these movies - Simin begins dressing up in costumes and wigs that approximate each person. And in these American Person costumes Simin videotapes herself re-telling their dreams, only plot-twist, this time in Farsi.
And something elliptical and poetic begins to sneak in here as we watch Simin strain to see herself reflected in the night-time eccentricities of your average American citizen – their weirdest selves splayed out like curiosities for her downtime, scabs that she can’t help but pick at. Simin finds herself, through dress up, trying to unravel the meaning behind the indecipherable nonsense that colludes to create an assured sense of purpose and belonging, and what that looks like from the outside.
Of course no matter what they’re selling on the tablets of their statues nothing scares the American Government more than an outsider attempting to understand what really makes this place tick, and so Simin’s bosses at the office begin inventing security risks where none existed five seconds before. They assign a stooge to follow her around (Matt Dillon, a lowkey delight), and they start pestering her to visit an off-books Iranian compound buried in the desert. And things only get stranger from there.
It’d be a crime to get too deep in the particulars of the reeds that make up one’s wander through this Land of Dreams, so let me just say that Neshat & Azari have delivered a moving and oddball-funny little fable that pricks and pokes at what it means and what it decidedly doesn’t mean to live in this outrageous country of ours. About who’s welcome, about how they are welcome, and about what being welcomed can do to one’s individuality in the process. And this is a show-stopping showcase for Sheila Vand, one of my favorite actresses working today, which is prize in itself -- wig after bigger wig, she's the dream that keeps on giving.