Problemista (2023)
Directed by Julio Torres
Julio Torres’ Problemista reminded me of the jobs I held in my 20s. More specifically, it reminded me of the shitty bosses I had through that time, and how my interactions with them calloused me, made me jaded and angry with where I was and where I wanted to be. Torres’ film is a bit playful, if not wide-eyed about these interactions, though he does capture the steady stream of anxiety that comes from knowing that most of your income is accounted for, determined to line the pockets of others before the end of your shift. It’s an immigrant story, sure, but it may as well be the story of any first-generation college graduate that thinks they're going to go on to do big things and change the world, only to find the weight of the world shaping you like clay. The film is cute, but the memories Problemista conjures is anything but.
My first job out of Loyola University was for a local nonprofit called The HistoryMakers. An organization dedicated to interviewing prominent African Americans in all disciplines, it was an institution that I thought I could do some good for. Combine my interest in filmmaking with a vital social component, wherein I could meet some of my heroes face-to-face? Coupled with an actual salary, I accepted a position at 28k and thought I was on top of the world. But if the disorganized interview didn’t clue me in that the company’s CEO and founder, the obstreperous Julianne Richardson (pronounced phonetically and with a suffocating air of pretension as: JU-LEE-ANNNNE Richard-son) may actually be an insane person; the next six months would be a casual reminder to always go with your gut.
Sixty-to-seventy-hour work weeks would often prompt at least one member of the team to leave in tears, as Richardson would verbally eviscerate you if your commitment to the cause was cast in doubt. Such doubt would be inspired by leaving early during your ten-plus-hour work day or submitting time for a vacation (even if said vacation is months away) or taking your lunch outside of the confines of your desk. When hired, I worked with three others who all had an exit strategy planned by the first day I was there. They tried to brace me for their departure, but a sudden outburst led to them no-showing all on the same day. Richardson, who seemed more content in ignoring me, struggled to remember my name on that day. It didn’t stop her from promoting me.
As the new head of an entire department (after less than a month of working there), I would see incremental boosts to my salary. A new team was assembled only to hemorrhage out, one-by-one. Someone leaving meant a boost in salary though, where I’d cap out to an astonishing 80k in under half a year. It’s 2011, I’m in my early 20s and making more money than I imagined I could make. I’m meeting some of the most interesting people of my life but I was utterly miserable. A micromanager to a molecular degree, Richardson crushed my spirit, who so arbitrarily determined what was pressing based entirely on her whim. I did it for the money until I couldn’t, where after months of embarrassment and shame, I just stopped going and never returned. There were a lot of good people that worked there, and the root of her mission is commendable, but I’ve circled the sun nearly 36 times and since then I’ve met few people more abrasive than her.
Fast forward to 2017, and I need to take a quick job as I’m finishing up my grad school responsibilities and bracing for the holiday season. I’m desperate, agonizing over applications to labs that I hope to work for. As I’m waiting to hear back, I take an administrative role for a company called Concierge Unlimited International. I didn’t have any delusions that this was explicitly a seasonal job and I made that exceedingly clear with staff and personnel. I was never meant for a position like this, given that all my life I’ve attended meetings in shorts and a hoodie. The idea of wearing a suit was akin to wearing a costume; a novelty that grew stifling very quickly. Their offices were located in the same building as the Lyric Opera House and I just remember taking lunches and phone interviews in the seats of the massive auditorium. I was never one for the opera and I certainly wasn’t one for this place; much like Julianne Richardson, CUI had a micromanager of a founder in Olga Pierce.
I got flashbacks of my time with The HistoryMakers pretty quickly, as I saw staff frequently berated and made to feel like inferiors. More often than not, I’d see people get verbally reprimanded for no apparent reason. Given my background at the time, Pierce seemed to take a liking to me, blowing me up in front of staff as someone who was going to help organize their profoundly disorganized operations. Like I said: I was not in it for the long haul. A week or two in and I’d see people quit, men sobbing the stalls of the rest room, and so many accusations against people’s intellect, all made by Pierce herself. I rationalized that it wasn’t my place to defend these people, but at the same time, I desperately wanted to intervene. I had the posh luxury of knowing my time was finite. And finally, when Pierce brought me into her office to have what was initially going to be a simple overview of my week, it ended up being a commentary on my future with the company. When told that I was wasting her time, I agreed, and explained that I thought she was doing the same for me. No one had so much as attempted to defend themselves and here I was clapping back. The next day I was told by HR that it wasn’t a good fit, and I gladly left that job after a couple of weeks of employment and a single paycheck. A few weeks after that, I’d have my interview with UChicago Medicine and the rest is history and nothing ever tumultuous ever happened to me ever again. Ever.
Right, this is supposed to resemble a movie review. So the crux of Problemista finds Alejandro (Julio Torres) working for Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), with the idea being that Elizabeth will sign off on his work visa upon selling some art pieces. There are a lot of familiar jokes here on FilmMaker Pro and Alejandro often feels like a composite of every foreign-exchange student you ever met in high school or college. Yet as funny and quirky as the film can be, I ended up having some trouble with the prevailing philosophy it seems to adopt in regards to hustle culture, and the abuse an employer can inflict on their employee. There’s a rather warped Stockholm syndrome-esque adoration for Elizabeth here, and Swinton makes it easy to adore her character with her eccentricities, but I found her charm to be the exact same thing I initially felt for Julianne Richardson and Olga Pierce; a kind of welcoming front to lower your defenses, before cataloging all the information they have about you to be used against you; think of Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) in Whiplash. I couldn’t get behind the film’s eventual reverence for this character, and subsequent embrace of the dictatorial qualities that resulted in Alejandro’s despair. The film seems to forgive her, without so much as acknowledging the inherent struggle in doing so. This, undeniably, has more to do with my personal experiences than that of the film, but I maintain that a more interesting film would have interrogated these mixed emotions, and took Elizabeth’s character to task. Instead, we’re left with a silly kid shuffling around, inspired by the callousness of his old boss to get everything that he wants, in exactly the same callous way she went about her life.