The Brooklyn Rail

Julio Torres’s Problemista (2023) depicts the drama of the US American Immigration Bureaucracy as a surrealist landscape that leaves one torn between crying and laughing. The wonderfully trashy picture of contemporary New York is a labyrinthian maze where getting visa sponsorship is essential to our protagonist Alejandro’s pursuits (Ale played by Torres himself). Much like the real-world process of obtaining citizenship, the cycle of poverty is depicted as an exhausting loop where you need money to get papers and papers to get money. Beneath the hilarious surface of this film is a dark center where the satirical take on the immigrant situation is all too real. As people in the immigration office vanish, one wonders about the disappearance of immigrants within the US and the traces their valuable presence leaves behind.

We emerge at the scene of Alejandro’s childhood home overlooking a verdant green El Salvadorian landscape. In a vignette of his mother’s (Catalina Saavedra) recurring dream he leaves his childhood home in pursuit of his dreams to be a toy designer in the US. “Alejandro,” his mother beckons to the wind and rain. Her son has left for a treacherously competitive path only available to a few in the most expensive city in the world. To begin with a dream is to refer at once to the history of Surrealist art, psychoanalysis, and to the language of immigration in the US. Dreams have been theorized as revealing unconscious wish fulfilments and ways of grieving one’s current reality. Another dream in the film happens when Ale falls asleep thinking about his citizenship crisis, which leaves him climbing the tops of filing cabinets through the walls of the immigration office like M.C. Escher’s Relativity (1953) lithograph, where the objects one climbs seem to stop making logical sense and you are left infinitely wandering a path leading to nowhere.

In line with the surrealism of Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, Torres’s images translate into a critique of the current political climate, located around immigrant and racial injustice plaguing communities of color in the States. He strikes something specific and revealing; remaining in the US comes forth as an affectual state of exhaustion that leaves Ale’s character caught in the throes of racial capitalism. This sinister form of exploitative economics is rooted in a systemic injustice keeping people of color and immigrants from ascending into any kind of sustainable living wage because of inaccessible bureaucratic demands. It is a system built for them to fail. In a sentiment echoed by José Esteban Muñoz in “Chico, What Does It Feel Like to Be a Problem?”the film serves to “consider the complexity of racial recognition, commonality and belonging.” Seeking to describe a life lived between worlds, Problemista centers feeling like a problem as a recognized state of feeling different, separate or double natured—it is indeed a surreal splitting that is not simply an impasse but an opening. Ale’s transmissions of brownness float in fields of possibility with a humorous delight that doesn’t take no for an answer.

The narrative is centered around Alejandro as a worker in a cryogenics facility taking care of the bodily archive of Bobby (RZA), a painter of eggs who never quite found his niche in the art world. The use of cryogenics in the film runs parallel to an ongoing theme that locates the position of the body in another objectified state. The potent metaphor of the ultimate preservation of bodies—a fad for the rich, a future bought with the promise of a return to life—reinstates the desire to stay, speaking to the highly commodifiable dream of remaining preserved in an ever shifting world wrought with decay. Ale’s future becomes entangled with Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) who is the sole proprietor of Bobby’s asleep remains. Elizabeth promises Ale citizenship sponsorship if he aids her in assembling a solo gallery show to sell paintings to pay the cryogenics facility to keep Bobby’s frozen state intact. Caught in what Fred Moten would call a fugitive state, Ale works to aid Elizabeth with her mission and strategizes to assemble all the materials with the hope that he can remain in New York to fulfill his toy designer fantasy, before his time is up.

Time being the most valued commodity, a recurring trope is a Remedios Varo-like symbol of an hourglass, each labeled with a name of another person in danger of disappearing at the hands of this cruel and unusual system. When Ale feels the pressure of his situation, the hourglasses show up, and the sound of sand ticking away quickens and grows louder, almost like a quickening heartbeat, a blood pressure rising. The image and sound evokes the physical stress of being on a clock that is about to run out. A sense of not having enough time, a mirage of its scarcity dictated by the status of legality. Those who are affected by the stress of this system pay not only a monetary cost, but a bodily one as well. The hourglasses in the film are so neatly packed away as if in an inventory closet; when one runs out of time it results in the physical disappearance of the person attached.

In a sudden poof—they are gone.