Direction: Julio Torres
Country: USA
Problemista is the directorial feature debut by Salvadoran-American Julio Torres, who embraces fantasy to tell the story of Alejandro, an aspiring toy maker from El Salvador who struggles to keep working and living in New York. Torres himself portrays the main character.
After losing his job as an archivist for FreezeCorp - a company specialized in freezing terminally ill humans to be awakened at some point in the future - Alejandro desperately finds a new sponsor for his work Visa and easy gigs on Craigslist to stay afloat. The solution is Elizabeth (a red-haired Tilda Swinton in top form), a neurotic, washed-up art critic whose painter husband (the rapper RZA) has been frozen.
The film flows stonily, with an offbeat vibe that often seduces, yet the wittiness is not a constant, working intermittently. The film is stronger on the dramatic side, with its best moments tapping into a sadness and disappointment with the world that most people will relate to. Swinton’s unbeatable delirium is a perfect foil for Torres’ apathetic confidence in a well-acted surrealist comedy whose main strength is the mood.
Problemista is only partially satisfying and easy to overlook, but hope is its last word - even if it means achieving things forcibly - and some aspects addressed are so true that they stay with you. It surely could have been better, but this is still a positive debut for Torres, who hired Isabella Rossellini as the film’s narrator.
