PROBLEMISTA - Mark Reviews Movies

Problemista, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 29, 2024

If there's a word to describe the protagonist of Problemista, it's "delicate." Here's a young man, an emigrant from El Salvador to the United States on a work visa, who takes careful little steps, as if he's afraid he'll trip with each one, and is so quiet that his story must be told by a narrator. He doesn't speak often, and when this man does, it's usually to agree with or give deference to someone else. There's a moment here when a passer-by literally walks through our protagonist, even as he's staring right at this stranger and speaking directly to her.

That's the existence of Alejandro, played by first-time writer/director Julio Torres, and it has as much to do with his personality as it does his status as a migrant. This film is a comedic character study about a young man who finally finds his voice from the most unlikely inspiration, but it's also an almost absurdist nightmare about how society and systems within the United States demand so many contradictory things from immigrants.

They must work, for example, in order to stay in the country, but they had better not make money in an official capacity without filling out the appropriate paperwork and paying a mandatory fee. How does one pay that fee without any official source of income? That's one problem for Alejandro, after he finds his employment sponsorship rendered void.

Another is that he must useful, but he can't be too useful, lest someone pay too much attention to him. Too much attention means suspicion and scrutiny, and for him, that means insecurity. He has to be close to invisible, essentially, but actually going unnoticed could be a problem, as well. How will people know they need him for something if they aren't aware or forget that Alejandro exists?

Torres' story is about a highwire act, then, and the film itself is a tightrope walk, too, in terms of its characters, its approach, and its tone. It's most successful on the merits of that last element. This is funny and surprisingly touching stuff, despite being about a seemingly hopeless and constantly terrifying experience that somehow finds its emotional core in a relationship that looks exploitative on the surface and could just be downright abusive from a certain perspective.

First, though, there's Alejandro's experience, as the son of an artist mother named Dolores (Catalina Saavedra), who created imaginative and safe worlds for him as a child (and whose role as a worrying figure back in El Salvador makes one wonder if there's a longer version of this material or if Torres simply lost that thread while writing the script). Now, his big dream is to work for a major toy manufacturer, designing playthings that either speak to the complexity of childhood or are likely to give many kids a complex or two.

For example, one is a spring toy that looks as if it would climb down stairs but doesn't, meaning kids learn about the effort of making a journey. Another is a toy truck with a tire that slowly deflates, teaching children about the inevitability of time. These are likely unsellable products, but they're solid gags, to be sure.

While working on applying for that job, Alejandro loses his current one at a cryogenic facility in New York City that caters specifically to artists, accidentally unplugging the backup generator of the frozen body in his care. This means Alejandro's legal status in the United States is on a countdown to deportation. He must find an employer who will sponsor his visa.

As luck would have it, the not-quite widow of the artist whose body Alejandro was watching is in need of help organizing a show for her not-quite-late husband's egg paintings. She's Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an art critic who demands everything be done in a very specific way. Alejandro convinces her that he can do all of those things in those particular ways, hoping she'll sponsor him if he proves himself.

This leads to a series of complications and obstacles. A good number of them are created by Elizabeth's persnickety personality: relying on an older database computer program when there are easier and less expensive ones available, yelling at customer support for her inability to navigate her smartphone, and inventing new issues whenever one is solved or revealed not to be one at all.

Others are just the trials of a corporatized and bureaucratized modern world: paying for necessities on an insecure budget, navigating the demands of immigration policy (visualized here as a maze of tiny office-based spaces), and a bank's overdraft fees compiling without any notice that it's happening. Torres sees these as the surreal experiences they can feel like, never more eerily than the representation of the internet's most infamous want-ad site as a clutter of junk and with a voice that makes everything sound just a bit sinister.

Through all of that, the film remains centered on the relationship between Alejandro and Elizabeth, who behaves like a monstrous personification of judgment and demands. Torres finds a unifying factor between the two, though. They're both desperate, and while Swinton admirably refuses to even hint at the possibility of a softer side to Elizabeth, flashbacks to a life with her husband (played by RZA), the narrator (empathetically voiced by Isabella Rossellini), and Alejandro's (potentially too) generous view of others allow us to see this woman might be almost as insecure as our protagonist, too.

Obviously, the humor of Problemista helps this thorny relationship come across as less troubling than it likely is, but so, too, does Torres' optimistic view of what these two characters can and do learn from each other. It's not until a most-hopeful epilogue, though, that we realize how sneakily affecting the dynamic between them has become.

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