To apply for a work visa in the United States is to set out on a biblical odyssey through a glacial, bureaucratic process renowned for its complex and expensive paperwork.
About a dozen years ago, comedian Julio Torres began that process. And, to help make ends meet as he waited — there is a lot of waiting — Torres, who is from El Salvador, took just about any menial job he could find.
He served as a translator for parent-teacher conferences and worked as a personal assistant for busy professionals in New York. At one point he interviewed for a magician’s assistant position.
One of his more demoralising gigs consisted of hawking hair-salon packages on the street, approaching random pedestrians with the line: "Excuse me, can I ask you a question about your hair?".
His total sales, he recalls, were "zero. None. Not a one."
This fraught period serves as inspiration for Torres’ new film, Problemista, a surreal, comedic fable about a Salvadoran immigrant who must navigate the confounding parallel realities of the New York art world and the US immigration system as he attempts to secure a work visa.
There are few, if any, voices in US comedy quite like Torres, a performer with a penchant for the odd, the arcane and the fantastically glam — he is evidence that darkly humorous realismo magico can exist in sparkly human form.
Torres first established himself as a writer on Saturday Night Live, but is perhaps best known for co-creating the HBO series Los Espookys, about a group of friends in an unnamed Latin American country who stage fake supernatural experiences.
Problemista likewise dwells in the absurd and unreal. Torres plays Alejandro, a guileless young dreamer who wants to design toys that teach children about the "joy of obstacles". Instead, he labours in a succession of bleak jobs as he tries to sort out his immigration status — including unsuccessfully hawking hair-salon packages on the street.
Among Alejandro’s more challenging gigs is assisting a hot-tempered art critic turned curator named Elizabeth (an inspired Tilda Swinton), who suggests that she might sponsor his visa application.
Elizabeth, however, is more focused on burnishing the reputation of her cryogenically frozen lover, an artist of dubious skill who made paintings of eggs. ("They’re not eggs, they’re hope," he says in flashback.)
The film captures, in visually inventive ways, the arduous task of securing a visa. Craigslist, where Alejandro sources his modest jobs, is dreamily embodied as a genie-like spirit who teases the young man with promises of work that always fizzle. Alejandro’s journey through the system is rendered as an infinite, architectural maze. Torres says he was interested in showing what "these things feel like".
And while he did not set out to make an issues-driven film about immigration at a time in which right-wing politicians are attacking immigrants, Torres does hope that Problemista will be "humanising" — so "we see people not as case numbers but as very specific people".
If his early years were a struggle, by 2016, Torres had hit a groove. That year, he was hired by Saturday Night Live. The following year, he had a stand-up special on Comedy Central, in which he shared the stage with a pair of giant talking crystals and opened his set by announcing: "I’m Julio. I’m an Aquarius. My favourite colour is clear".
Swinton’s role is central to the film. The idea for Problemista began with the character of Elizabeth, bossy but also possessed of conviction, says Torres.
"I would find myself throughout the day talking like her."
During the pandemic, as Covid shuttered filming on Los Espookys — and everything else — Torres began to work on the script for Problemista, putting that voice to paper.
"I really think of her as the story of that lion with the thorn in its paw," he says.
"She just assumes that people will hurt her. I think that’s true of most monstrous people, is that they are so wounded."
It’s a personality type he has seen a lot in the arts, he says. "What is it about people that work with beautiful garments or beautiful paintings or the decorative arts?" he asks.
"Why are they like this?"
Torres would like another opportunity to direct.
"The beautiful thing about directing for me is that it sort of comes full circle and it connects the dots with my visual interests, my spatial interests and humor and writing and story writing and world-building," he says.
The film
• Problemista screens as part of the NZ International Film Festival at the Regent Theatre, tonight at 6.15pm. — TCA
