Review: The Egg is Alone in Manhattan!
Julio Torres’ ‘Problemista’ is weird, wonderful art about Art
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰
Romance: ✰
Sex: ✰
Storytelling: ✰✰✰✰✰
Performance: ✰✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰✰✰
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Some spoilers ahead!
Written by Ali Romig
When I moved to New York at the buoyant young age of twenty-one, my first job was as the personal assistant to a man who ran his own start-up. Ours was a two-person operation. My duties included running his Quickbooks (a program I’d never heard of before my first day), shepherding checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars from the office to the bank on the corner (carried loose leaf in my since-discarded New Yorker tote bag), and begrudgingly offering emotional support after he read “Cat Person” for the first time, among other things. All this is to say, this was the kind of job one has to take, not the kind one wants to take.
I found myself bluntly thrust back into this experience while watching Julio Torres’ semi-autobiographical directorial debut Problemista, a surrealist, sharply funny and dark fairytale about what it takes to make it in this nearly inhospitable city. In the film, Torres plays Alejandro, who has moved to New York from El Salvador and, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up assisting the draconic Elizabeth. And while this film reminded me of my own incredibly formative time in assistant-hell, the movie is about so much more—it’s a candid look at the U.S.’s intentionally unnavigable immigration system, as well as a rumination on the importance of complicated, inconvenient art at a time when expediency and ease reign supreme.
From the first scene we understand that Problemista exists outside the boundaries of our world, as a young Ale watches his artist mother, Dolores (Catalina Saavedra), create a massive, impossible castle-like sculpture in the middle of a dreamy field in El Salvador. Isabella Rossilini narrates as if reading from a storybook—using her soothing, hypnotic voice to tell us that Dolores fears the day that Ale, dressed in all blue, will stand at the mouth of a cave and face off with a monster. Years later, Ale is living in New York struggling to get his application for Hasboro’s “Talent Incubation Program” seen by an actual human person. He dreams of becoming a famous toymaker, constantly recording ideas in his notebook. Among them: a Barbie that is essentially just a Barbie, but with her fingers crossed behind her back; a Cabbage Patch Kid with a smartphone, asking her friend if the sore in her mouth is something to worry about; a toy truck with the air slowly leaking out of its tires, so that kids must play while knowing that they’re running out of time.
For money, Ale works at a cryogenic freezing company looking after the preserved body of a terminally-ill painter named Bobby (RZA), who in life only ever painted eggs. When he accidentally unplugs the backup generator, Ale loses his job—leaving him with no one to sponsor his visa and only 30 days to find a solution before he’s forced to leave. It’s in this moment of desperation that Ale meets Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), Bobby’s wife. Elizabeth explodes onto the scene in a burst of magenta hair and one constantly shining iPhone flashlight (which she remains oblivious to). Once a respected art critic, Elizabeth lost her reputation defending Bobby’s work and, now broke, spends all her energy trying to protect his legacy. When Ale offers to help her pitch a gallery show, she makes him a deal: if they can successfully place Bobby’s exhibit, “Thirteen Eggs”, she’ll sponsor his visa. She only has one simple question for him: does he know FileMaker Pro?
I have been sorely missing Julio Torres’ singular, magical brand of humor ever since his dreamlike horror-comedy, Los Espookys, was unceremoniously canceled by HBO last year. In many ways, this film feels like it is in direct conversation with his past work. If you were a fan of that series, you’ll recognize several faces in Problemista (River L. Ramirez as a gun-toting Bank of America employee; Spike Einbinder as a cool yet caring roommate; Greta Titelman as Elizabeth’s disgruntled ex-employee). In my review of Los Espookys, I called its aesthetic “at once highly stylized and extremely DIY'', and the same holds true here. The settings, especially the fantastical ones, have an artful, handmade quality to them. Meaning is imbued in every silly detail; for example, I love how Brooklyn is depicted as an ever-expanding dumping ground for junk. Trash is either fossilized in puddles of muck on the sidewalk or piled high in every scene, and there is always some piece of art amongst the stuffed black bags—paintings, sculptures, installations.
As in previous projects, Torres plays with magical realism to highlight the absurdity of our reality—only this time with a softer, more ethereal touch than he’s used in the past. One of my favorite parts of the movie is Larry Owen’s playing a psychedelic, personified version of Craigslist, presenting Alejandro with such illustrious opportunities as selling salon vouchers and being someone’s “cleaning boy”. But these elements of fantasy are best utilized when they are shining a light on the deliberately confusing inner mechanisms of the United States immigration system. Throughout Problemista, Alejandro is shown working his way through a maze in which the key to escape is always locked behind the next door. When someone runs out of time to find a sponsor for their visa, they disappear on the spot.
If I had one gripe with Problemista, it would be that the movie has a lot more empathy for Elizabeth than I do. I don’t mean for this to sound callous—yes, her husband is cryogenically frozen and has left her with the bill. That sucks! But this is also a woman whose response to even the slightest pushback is to scream, “Why are you yelling at me?!” Who approaches customer service professionals and waitstaff with the patience of a gassy toddler. Whose single-minded obsession with the benefits of FileMaker Pro, while simultaneously having absolutely no understanding of how it works, reminds me of every single boss I’ve ever had who’s asked me to edit a scanned PDF as if it were a Word document. Okay, so maybe my personal bitterness is seeping through here, but I maintain that Elizabeth is given more of a hero’s arc than she’s due. But honestly, Swinton and Torres have such amazing chemistry with one another that I almost don’t care. Also…sometimes being so incredibly one-track-minded about your goals—even to the disservice of others—is the only way to get things done. An unfortunate truth that this movie doesn’t go so far as to endorse, but is still able to examine with nuance.
While Alejandro and Elizabeth’s odd-ball relationship may be the beating heart of the film, it’s Dolores who delivers its most potent message. With a final, sweeping sculpture, she monumentalizes Ale’s tenacity and the need for art that is bothersome and disrupts the flow of everyday life, rather than incentivizes it. Torres is a rare voice in film and television, and Problemista is yet another of his works that makes me go, “damn, to be inside his mind for a day!”
Problemista is in theaters now!
Elephant in the Werkroom
Season 16, Episode 11:
Drag seminars…hmm. I wanted to be open to this challenge—it sounded vaguely like those PowerPoint parties everyone was throwing when they were 23—but honestly, this challenge fell so flat that it resembled Derrick Barry’s ass.
Plane and Q end up doing fine (which in this challenge means amazing) presenting on “Do You Know Your Drag History”; Nymphia, Sapphira, and Morphine are unmemorable presenting on “Are You a Drag Queen? You Might be Surprised!”; and Dawn and Mhi’ya are essentially disastrous presenting on “Drag in the Werkplace”.
Despite amazing critiques from the judges, neither Q nor Plane won this week. After we actually get to see some deliberations, Sapphira ends up on top. These deliberations seemed to show that the critiques aren’t always indicative of what the judges are thinking, which makes me miss their presence in every episode even more!
Mhi’ya and Morphine end up in the bottom, and both put on a great show in a lip sync to Donna Summer’s “Dim All the Lights”. But not even her tricks can save Mhi’ya this time, and after her fourth time in the bottom, she sashays away.
