The Girl of Your Dreams is a historic, comedic drama set during the Spanish Civil War, but unfolds in Nazi Germany. In order to fulfill their professional artistic dreams and escape the horrors of war, a Spanish film cast and crew collaborate with a Nazi Berlin film studio to coproduce Spanish and German versions of the same film, a nineteenth century Andalusian musical that I am unfamiliar with, but clearly has a Carmen aesthetic. There is an initially humorous culture clash, a comedy of sexual errors as it is implied that the cast is playing musical beds and heavy doses of hey, let’s put on a show trope and the villain, Goebbels or Go Balls, leans heavily into a lesser known branch of the And Now You Must Marry Me trope, the Scarpia Ultimatum, except instead of marriage the heroine, played by Penelope Cruz, must have sex with the villain to save everyone, but it is set in a casting couch environment.
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The hero of the film is the Spanish director, and it clearly never struck the creators of The Girl of Your Dreams that he starts off very similar to Goebbels, but is seen as initially an apolitical albeit problematic collaborator. Even though he is already having a seemingly consensual affair with Cruz’s character, it may not really be consensual since she believes that working on his film may save her father’s life. The Spanish director clearly undergoes a transformation as he realizes that he has put her in an awful predicament when he is tempted to withhold the truth of the situation from her in order to attain professional success. He is basically a pimp for the Nazis. They are both married men who use their professional standing to gain sexual advantage over their employees.
Some may argue that Cruz’s character actually cares for the Spanish director, which she does comparatively, but I noticed that her assistant behaves similarly with him as she does with Goebbels in trying to prevent him from spending time alone with her. Also she actually pursues and is attracted to Leo, a Russian Jew and concentration camp inmate. Out of everyone in the Spanish film cast and crew, Cruz’s character is the only one that sees and treats the Jewish extras as people. Everyone else is more concerned about their own situation. There is some argument to be made that if Leo wasn’t hot, she may have been disinterested too. (Side note: imagine if a young Rutger Hauer played Leo!) There is a prevailing incorrect assumption that if they are prisoners, they must have done something wrong. There is also the uncomfortable reality that even if they are not enthusiastic about their allegiance, and it is an accident of location, they are on Franco’s side, which is how they end up working with the Nazis.
As The Girl of Your Dreams unfolds, the tone abandons the Mel Brooks vibe and gets more serious as the hero and heroine are morally convicted into thwarting the Nazis’ plan to get Goebbels to sleep with (the film wisely depicts it for what it is, rape) Cruz’s character and kill Leo. The central theme of The Girl of Your Dreams is that true artists cannot be apolitical. One character that will do anything to further his career has a subplot that mirrors Cruz’s predicament with Goebbels except he actively puts himself in the situation and is unaware that it is sexual. He is a coward who feigns injuries then later suffers karmic reality of his fervent allegiance to fascism. The film ultimately punishes those who landed on the wrong side of history, but because the majority of the film is humorous, when serious consequences start to happen, the effect is jarring and shocking. It takes an abrupt swerve into Casablanca territory.
The Girl of Your Dreams is not a must see film, but it is an entertaining history lesson of what happened to Spanish cinema during the Spanish Civil War and a subtle tribute to classic filmmaking. The Girl of Your Dreams may also be a comedic Tarantinoesque historical fantasy of what Spanish moviemakers’ role could have been during the Nazis’ reign. If you do decide to see it, then you must also be prepared to watch its sequel, The Queen of Spain. The movie is less fun in retrospect after I discovered that it is an unauthorized movie biography of Imperio Argentina when she worked on Carmen (la de Triana) and Nights in Andalusia. It appears that the filmmakers may only understand consent when the violator is not Spanish.