Problemista

dir: Julio Torres

2024

Problemista is, I guess, by its very nature, a pretty niche seeming movie, and while I’d never argue that its themes are universal (especially for the mostly whitebread hipster audience that would even make the time to watch such a film), they impact millions of people's lives in the States, but it’s treated here with a comical and deeply absurdist approach that doesn’t detract from its overall message.

What are its overall messages? Well, the first one is that anyone in or around the Arts ‘industry’ is a monster and should be totally avoided at all costs, because they only bring misery to the people around them. That checks out. Tilda Swinton plays that embodiment of the terribleness of arts-adjacent curators/creators/parasites/critics as The Hydra / Elizabeth.

The real message is that the work visa scheme, the pathway to being able to stay and work in the United States, is an absurdist, coldly cruel, convoluted and contradictory nightmare that puts people through hell for no better reason than appealing to voters by saying “we’re tough on immigrants”, as if that’s a good thing. You can’t earn while in this state but you still have to pay about $6000 in fees, in order to get sponsored by someone, but they can’t sponsor you until you start earning, so you have to earn cash money for it to be hidden, and if you get caught or they decline to sponsor you, you’re kicked out anyway.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare that would bring Kafka himself to say “this is needlessly cruel dehumanising bullshit.”

Julio Torres directs and stars in the flick, and if you have any inkling as to who he is, seen his stand up special about his favourite shapes, or some of the shows he’s worked on, you’d know that this story, though fictional, unless Tilda Swinton did actually torment him for ages with her lack of knowledge about basic technology and what really seems like a borderline personality disorder, is based on his life. Like his character here of Ale, short for Alejandro, he’s from El Salvador, loves his mum, is a vegan, and tried to get by in Brooklyn through the shittiest of cash jobs and bizarre arrangements, often connected to the infamous Craigslist, before finding some success and security.

There’s a lot of anachronistic, outdated technology referred to continuously in this flick, and the weirdest / funniest part about it is how recently that stuff was around and so crucial, and is already redundant. I don’t honestly know what FileMaker Pro is, but a lot of people in this film also pretend to know how to use it and what it does, and in the end it seems like no-one actually knows, one of those eternal mysteries.

Alejandro comes across as a child, a grown-up child, but mostly an innocent all the same. He greets abuse at the hands of Elizabeth, disinterest on the part of the Immigration department, and active hostility hidden behind protocol on the phone with his bank, with a child-like naiveté that because he’s been hard done by, or because something that’s happened is clearly unfair, that if only someone would acknowledge that fact, everyone’s humanity would be restored, and things would be set to rights, and the precariousness of his existence could perhaps reduce, a bit.

And he’s expecting this to happen in contemporary New York.

I think that’s part of the joke, really. There’s no doubt in my mind that Torres early years before he carved out some space for himself as a comedy writer / performance artist / actor were precarious as shit, but he’s not trying to say, I don’t think, that it was terrible and we should be made to suffer for it. I think the wry / absurdist lens he applies to everything is a way of making his struggles, such as they were, amidst the denizens of a place that shouldn’t be real, but is (Brooklyn, and not only Brooklyn, but Bushwick), with all its types and pretentions, have an element of humour to go along with the pathos, to not just make it about a bunch of shitty people’s affectations and quirks.

I think that’s why in the portrait that is painted of Elizabeth, he makes her a selfish and self-involved monster, as ably embodied by Swinton, but not a complete monster. She seems oblivious to how truly horrible she is towards others, but she has enough emotional intelligence to also master how she can best manipulate people with their hopes and vulnerabilities.

And if her performance wasn’t vivid enough, there’s also the divine spectacle of the relationship that she is in mourning over, and still bitterly clinging to, with her artist husband Bobby (The RZA, in all his blonde headed glory), who painted nothing but eggs before getting himself cryogenically frozen.

Putting on a show of his works becomes a bizarre driving force for the flick, giving the (appalling) Elizabeth something to do, and dangles the carrot of potential sponsorship for Alejandro.

But it’s not even about that. Putting on a show, in all sorts of films, in all sorts of contexts, is always the illusory event that’s meant to give characters (and viewers) some kind of momentum, hurtling towards a ticking clock, and yet we should five minutes into a film like this (a film which has Craiglist exist in physical form played by Larry Owens, who is hilarious, satanic and seductive in those bizarre line readings), we would know nothing follows any path smoothly.

You see, Alejandro’s dream is to make depressing, too clever toys for Hasbro. Toys like cars with deliberately flat tyres, in order to teach kids about mortality, or Cabbage Patch dolls with mobile phones sending each other pictures about what they fear might be a cancerous growth in their mouths.

Strange, completely unlikely and implausible stuff, but you’ve got to dream, right?

I can say very easily that I enjoyed this flick, because I guess I can appreciate the sensibility, and that I find Julio Torres’ approach to stuff appealing and funny. Highly humorous. It’s not always laugh out loud funny, but it’s amusing enough for me.

But, please don't get me wrong, it's also painfully awkward at times, as awkward as anything you can imagine.

It’s an outsider’s view of the absurdity of modern American life which isn’t that interested in the toxic elements or arguments that a lot of other films purport to tackle, because it’s focus is very narrow, and very much intended to just show how hard it is for a gentle, retiring little soul like Alejandro to get by in this barbarous concrete jungle without being despoiled.

It’s sweet and silly enough in parts to make up for the lack of substance. It helps that the great Isabella Rossellini is on hand to deliver most excellent voiceover to elaborate upon some elements of the story, for us to understand Ale’s world a bit better, because thankfully for most of us it’s not like our own.

This isn’t going to change people’s minds about anything, because hardass anti-immigrant hardliners aren’t going to watch a flick like this anyway. It’s only us pretentious sensitive types from inner city enclaves that saunter down to our local arthouse cinema (if it survived the covid years) to watch something like this in between complaining about the quality of our lattes, or whether our prosecco is organic enough or not.

But we need our amusements too. If the ending is too absurd to be taken seriously, well, it didn’t bug me too much. It seemed right for the story that Julio wanted to tell, and if you didn’t want a ‘happy’ ending for Ale, well, you’re a piece of shit anyway, and I don’t want to argue with you, you big meaney.

It’s a fairly singular vision, and a singular piece of work, and I enjoyed it enough.

8 times I’m so glad I don’t have to wrestle with the immigration bureaucracy from their side of things out of 10

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“I stand with the Bank of America!” *pow* - Problemista