“Problemista” at SXSW 2023
Image by Fergus Campbell
Problemista opens on a computer-generated playground in the middle of a jungle. Alejandro Martinez is there, and his mother protects and nurtures him—we learn this through Burton-esque narration, but Isabella Rossellini, à la Marcel, is our voice, not Geoffrey Holder. Torres might be playing into all the media’s loglines of his work: fantastical, childlike, “innocent,” even though this opening scene is a binding for a film that takes place in that most un-enchanted of places: New York City.
To be clear, this is not the New York of Enchanted, in fact one of the most magical places in the world. No, we’re in Bushwick, probably under the J train, in tiny, barren, partitioned apartments. That introductory urban tracking shot, past stooped skyline pictures to a balloon taped on a telephone pole, feels representative, in its barely-there whimsy and minimal technical trappings, of how uninterested Torres is in the modern moviemaking gloss that happens to define Everything Everywhere All at Once, which received a shoutout at South By Southwest, the Austin festival where Problemista premiered, after winning Best Picture on Sunday. (Everything premiered at SXSW a year ago.) Those Everything tendencies seem to be homogenizing A24’s output. Horror auteurs and film buffs go for analog simulacra and sound effects at every cut. Problemista still has one of those A24 title sequences, but it isn’t algorithmic, as I’m used to—instead several pieces of a whole, an oil painting, intercut with Alejandro’s mythic beginning.
I had no expectations going into the film, apart from an understanding (correct) that Torres would basically be playing himself. I hadn’t considered what a feature means for Torres, who, when you think about it, has had a plentiful career; he starred in and co-wrote two seasons of Los Espookys, on top of My Favorite Shapes, an HBO special, and is the author, of course, of some of the best SNL sketches in recent memory, like Wells for Boys and The Actress. I knew the comprehensive version of his professional history because my first assignment as an intern for Michael Schulman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was transcribing interviews for Schulman’s profile of Torres. Schulman was meant to cover production of the second season of Los Espookys, in Chile, but that was March 2020, and in the summer there was no inkling of when the profile would be released.
The opening of Problemista is so evocative of Pedro Almodovar—the colors, that latent and encroaching sense of destiny—that, up in the Paramount’s nosebleeds, I had a vision of Torres’s career arc, maybe centered on New York and El Salvador and following some parallel version of the riotous stakes and personalities in the Almodovar canon. The Spanish auteur went autobiographical for his second-newest film, Pain and Glory—more than three decades into his career—but in this age of identity art, Torres is inverting the arc. Except he isn’t staking out its first point now, instead folding in all the ideas from his previous work. (A Wonka adaptation may come in 2031.) I don’t know why you wouldn’t do this, but for some reason the decision surprised me. If nothing else, it’s worthwhile to prove that a theme for an SNL sketch (bizarre toy concepts) can fit a feature-length narrative, that a plot can be populated with so many seemingly isolated and unadaptable ideas.
I loved Problemista because of this retrospective quality. Alejandro aims to secure his visa by freelancing for Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a batshit curator mourning the loss of her partner and protégé (played by RZA, this painter froze himself in case technological progress allows his unfreezing in the future). Alejandro is hemmed in by New York but also enthralled by its possibilities, its art-world status—or perhaps he isn’t? And he’s just aware of how much promise the city holds, without seeing any manifestations of that promise? Because, apart from Elizabeth’s classical New York apartment—it’s got an arched industrial window, beautifully scattered paintings and concrete floors—the New York we see is the one occupied by youth, operating on the peripheries of the creative industry. Alejandro must sublet his room to pay legal fees, but his roommate (played by longtime friend Spike Einbender) and their friends keep colonizing the living room, where Alejandro’s been sleeping.
The film’s surrealist details can’t be mistaken for stylized filler. In the waiting room at the legal office, Alejandro watches immigrants whose time has run out literally disappear before his eyes. The casual inclusion of the frozen-body tubes, ready for jet propulsion into the future, and lines like “Bingham won a Guggenheim fellowship for being cute in the arts” (Bingham is Alejandro’s brief, Columbia-bred replacement as Elizabeth’s assistant), are perhaps what make Problemista a comedy, but they’re so embedded within an honest portrayal of New York life that they only serve to amplify that world. They make it sticky.
As with all good films, the indelible scenes sneak up on you. One is Alejandro’s call with a Bank of America representative, regarding his negative card balance, which takes place partly in the hellscape of Alejandro’s worst fears—and which climaxes in that hellscape, as the bank rep reveals a gun and shoots Alejandro. The commentary here is earnest and resoundingly relatable; it feels like a tweet. It’s also what might power the film to commercial success, even though the scene is not pandering—it’s just contemporary, and part of the rolodex that’s central to Torres’s stand-up.
The evolved iteration of this scene’s sentiment is essentially the film’s finale: Alejandro taking note of Elizabeth’s abrasiveness and marching up to Hasbro headquarters, ripping into an executive for stealing his ideas, and demanding a job. It’s invigorating populism, but also a chance for Torres to unite his distinctive physicality with his line delivery, which doesn’t always happen in the film, as Tilda Swinton takes up so much space. The broadest comedy, rather than funny relatability, comes from Elizabeth. Her muchness threatens at times to overwhelm the film, but is eventually subsumed within the whole, perhaps because of a somewhat sentimental narrative progression. The opposing types—novice and stalwart—learn from each other, and grow.
Wonderful interruptions come in scenes like the one where Alejandro’s desperate pursuit of income leads him to Craigslist, and then a man’s apartment; Alejandro washes the man’s windows with his pants off. There’s a brief cut of a kiss, a sign that Alejandro might not have perceived the encounter as purely transactional. The cut is also an indication of more experimental decisions Torres might make in the future, beyond those dream settings. How arthouse can he go? I don’t follow many new directors closely, and I’ve been following Torres because of my own work for Schulman. But he makes me so excited for the near-term future (Rachel Sennott, whose first co-written feature, Bottoms, premiered on Saturday, does too). I’m of the age now where I relate more to the stories populating the cultural vanguard: there’s a lot of queer New York, of artistic struggle and the comedic language I share with my friends.
At the Q&A after the screening, Swinton made the awkward move of likening Elizabeth’s immigrant narrative to Alejandro’s. She should have expressed the glimmering fact that, wherever we come from, we’re all now in this same place (if you, like me, are in New York), doing a version of the same thing. The competition is meaty and diffuse and diverse. Torres looks in Problemista like he could be anywhere from 24 to 35 (he’s 36), and the artifacts in the film (an early aughts Mac desktop, a Venmo request) imply an exaggerated period of feeling too young and unimportant. I am writing from South by Southwest in Austin; I don’t have a badge, am borrowing my friend’s boss’s when he doesn’t want it, which is always. I watched the Oscars at a beer garden with a drunk woman who correctly guessed the weight of an Oscars statuette, as Schulman covered the ceremony in person at the Dolby. For now, I have nowhere to be. This will go on for a while.
Fergus Campbell is a writer and filmmaker, and the producer of Sankyo Stream, a web series.
