PROBLEMISTA

Rating: 5

There is so much to admire about Julio Torres’s PROBLEMISTA, from its magnificent manifestations of metaphor to its tweaking of subjective norms and random exploitation in a provocative satire as dark as night, but as hopeful as a buoyant full moon. The one that reigns supreme, though, is what Torres has done with the desperate, incendiary monster of the piece, played with crackling clarity by Tilda Swinton. In a film about following a dream, she is the catalyst that transforms its protagonist, Alejandro Martinez (Torres), an immigrant from El Salvador, from a young man playing by the rules to one who takes a world that has no room for good manners, or fair play, and wrings what he wants out of it. It’s a lively journey and a rewarding one as chaos is rendered into order, but not without one heck of a fight.

Ale, as he is known to his doting artist mother (Catalina Saavedra), is an aspiring toy designer. He is a sweet mama’s boy stumbling through life with a geisha’s shuffle and a cowlick with a mind of its own. He’s also a bracingly original thinker, whose designs include a recalcitrant Slinky and a truck with one tire about to go flat. Children, as narrator Isabella Rosellini explains, need less fun and more tension and intrigue in their play. Ale is about to get both as he loses his job as an archivist at a cryogenics facility after an unfortunate accident with a power cord. In the blink of an eye, he finds himself suddenly racing the clock to find another sponsor for his work visa or be deported. Yet the cause of his desperate situation also offers a way out.  Maybe. The patient he briefly unplugged is an artist (Rza) obsessed with eggs, and either fate or chance finds Ale in the employ of his wife, Elizabeth (Swinton) an art critic obsessed with keeping her husband frozen until his cancer can be cured and financing it by cementing his reputation in the art world. She’s also a Technicolor virago, larger than life whose wardrobe is soigné performance art as she roars at the world with a torrent of abuse born of paranoia and thwarted ambition. But it’s also born of that obsession to make good on her promise to the artist she loves, and the gleam in Swinton’s eyes is more than mere madness. It is a pure distillation of Elizabeth’s fanatical determination to hound the world into submission, a fanaticism that does not have room for such minor considerations as reality or keeping track of her keys. Until Ale, who plays along at first in order to get her sponsorship, but eventually comes not just to understand this nightmare, but to appreciate her and her monomania. Warily. Blood may or may not be spilled.

Torres’ use of magical realism is superb. His visualizations of the seductive menace of Craig’s List to the desperate job seeker is sharp enough to elicit a gasp or two, while his life-size maze depicting the Catch-22 of Ale’s struggles with the immigration process explicates its inherent absurdity in a way that is damning and witty. As for what he does with the cruelty of bank fees, it is enough to make the audience murmur as one selected passages from Karl Marx. That he also sets the reality of his film in a New York that is overflowing the detritus of abandoned apartments makes for its own piquant descant on the action.

PROBLEMISTA turns a world of obstacles into challenges that may be more invigorating in retrospect, but are also, for that very reason, more involving. You will never think of eggs, rudeness, or Filemaker Pro in the same way after Torres has re-envisioned them. And, with luck, you won’t see the world at large the same way, either.