Alejandro has a dream: He wants to design toys.
OK, granted, Alejandro’s toy designs are kinda odd. There’s his idea of a Barbie doll, for instance, that crosses her fingers behind her back so that she doesn’t have to live up to her promises. And he came up with an idea for a Slinky … that refuses to fall down stairs. So … nobody would probably want an Alejandro toy. But it’s his dream. And his mom always encouraged him to seek out his dreams.
Problem is, dreams don’t come easily in America. In fact, just staying in the States legally is an uphill climb for Alejandro. (It might actually be better if he were here illegally, then no one would care.) Alejandro, you see, is here on a work visa from El Salvador. And the company that was sponsoring him just let him go. So now he only has a few weeks to find another U.S. sponsor before being deported.
That’s when he meets Elizabeth. She’s an explosively psychotic art critic who used to be married to a failing artist. But then when her artist husband, Bobby, was diagnosed with cancer, he opted to have himself frozen by a cryogenics company. And that was the company Alejandro was working for before he accidently tripped over the extension cord powering Bobby’s cryo-pod and was subsequently fired.
So, Elizabeth suggests that she might agree to sponsor Alejandro as long as he agrees to help her curate an exhibition of her dead husband’s underappreciated paintings.
You see how one crazy thing leads to another? It’s almost as if Alejandro’s life is one big slapstick comedy sketch. Or maybe just a crazy Salvadorean nightmare. (He has a few of those, too.)
Oh well, Alejandro just needs to keep trudging forward and do whatever it takes to reach his goals.
That’s what a finger-crossing Barbie would do.
There’s a natural earnestness about Alejandro. He tries to stay positive and forward-thinking despite the slings and arrows coming at him from Elizabeth and the world at large. Still, beneath Elizabeth’s generally self-serving, chaotic craziness, she does want to honor her husband’s work and memory.
Eventually these disparate characters are able to form a copacetic connection that could almost be seen as a relationship. In fact, Alejandro is able to eventually achieve something positive in his life using something he learned from Elizabeth.
In El Salvador, Alejandro’s engineer mom builds exotic forts and towers for him when he’s a boy. In a way, she sees her efforts as her way of insulating and protecting him from the dangers of the world. Eventually, though, he grows up and moves away. But they still maintain a good mother-child relationship.
Alejandro finds himself flying off on flights of imaginative fancy where he envisions his real-world conflicts in the context of a fantasy battle with a dragon in a cave.
Since Alejandro can’t legally earn a salary, he seeks out cash jobs on Craigslist. One of those is a “cleaning fetish” job. His male employer touches himself while Alejandro cleans windows in various states of undress. Eventually the two men kiss and one performs oral sex on the other (just off screen). In a flashback scene, Bobby has an affair with another woman. (We don’t see anything physical.) One of Elizabeth’s other interns is gay. A curator for an art gallery wears a very formfitting dress.
With her flaming red hair flying and with constant howls of complaint on her lips, Elizabeth almost feels like a metaphorical embodiment of hostility herself. One of her interpersonal techniques is to scream at anyone—shop keepers, waitresses, etc.—until they respond in kind. And then she accuses them of being abusive. (She uses this in an effort to avoid any conflict that confronts her.
Alejandro has a fantasy vision in which someone shoots him.
The cryogenics company is, in essence, killing terminally ill people with the promise that “our scientists are working around the clock to hopefully be able to someday bring our patients back.”
The dialogue is occasionally dotted by f- and s-words (a total of three apiece). God’s name is misused three times.
Elizabeth drinks wine and smokes. And Alejandro lives in a cramped shared apartment which seems to have a never-ending party going on in its common living area. People drink beer and smoke pot.
[Spoiler Warning] Out of the blue, Elizabeth decides to drink Bobby’s left over “cryo-juice” medication that’s in her fridge. The company retrieves her body and puts her in a cryo-pod.
Alejandro lies about being well versed in a certain software program, just to get a job. And Elizabeth has very few positive things to say about anyone around her. A company steals an idea that Alejandro pitched without giving him credit. The film points out the seemingly illogical nature of the U.S. immigration system, in that it sometimes seems to punish immigrants who are playing by the rules.
Julio Torres’s filmmaking debut, Problemista, is quirky and strange. That’s the clearest and most precise assessment I can give this surrealist satire. It’s a very simple story of a young Salvadorean toymaker who’s struggling to stay in the States legally. But it feels more like a collection of skits and Freudian dream scenes than it does an actual film script. (Which sorta makes sense, given Torres’s Saturday Night Live background.)
That’s not to say that there aren’t any funny bits in all this off-kilter oddness. Tilda Swinton jumps into her outlandishly capricious art-critic role with more shrill gusto than a half-dozen schizophrenic inmates. And all of the other characters scramble comically to keep up with her. But frankly, after a while it all kinda gets old.
However, if you’re really in the mood for a heaping helping of chaotic absurdity with a dash of social commentary on the side, well, Problemista has you covered. Of course, you’ll also need to go in ready to encounter indulgent attitudes about drinking, drugs, sexual fetishes and nasty language—which may well be more “problemistas” than many would-be viewers really want to deal with.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
