It was an inspired choice when the Provincetown International Film Festival’s gave Julio Torres, the writer-director-star of a fanciful new comedy, Problemista, one of its Next Wave awards last June.
The movie was at the Waters Edge Cinema last week. (No streaming date has been announced.) It’s the story of Alejandro, an immigrant from El Salvador much like Torres himself, who is looking for a job as a toy designer in New York City in order to gain a green card. Alejandro confronts a cascade of Kafkaesque obstacles in various spheres — apartment hunting, the toy industry, a cryogenics firm, and the world of artists and galleries — and an array of kooks in each one.
Torres told the Independent last year that the movie is about “problems, people who cause problems, who are attracted to problems.” That’s the titular theme, to be sure, but what the movie is really about is imagination and creativity — and the absurdity of trying to squelch them. Torres, a writer for Saturday Night Live and the HBO comedy Los Espookys, has a low-key hipster sense of humor, and he likes to mix the fantastic with the mundane. He exhibits little overt hostility to the weirdness and bureaucracy he encounters, but he sublimates his frustrations in cartoonish daydreams and an apparent fetish for humiliation.
Both Torres and Alejandro are queer, and while that’s not a defining aspect of the film, it emerges in eccentric ways. Tilda Swinton, for example, plays one of Alejandro’s patrons, a would-be art dealer with a cerise fright wig and a bipolar personality — it’s a part that could easily be taken on by a drag performer.
Problemista has a sweet fable-like narrative, and Torres is charming enough to make it work. It will be curious to see where he takes that sensibility in future features, now that he’s more than earned his green card.
Meanwhile, the dearth of interesting new films in April offers a chance to catch up on some lesser-known 2023 releases that are currently available for streaming.
One, an ultraviolent Finnish film called Sisu, is like a spaghetti Western, a samurai thriller, a Mad Max film, and a Tarantino movie without his usual dialogue riffs. It’s set in 1944, near the end of World War II, when Finland was under attack from Nazi troops retreating to Norway and leaving burning villages and massacred civilians in their wake.
In the sparsely populated countryside, a grizzled older man, Aatami, is panning for gold. Aatami (played by the marvelous Jorma Tommila) had been a Finnish soldier and a killing machine, one whose lethal tenacity had become the stuff of legend. But after he lost his wife and children to the war, he deserted and decided the only thing left that he cared about was finding gold. This is a classic action-movie archetype: the taciturn, stone-faced outsider, a shrewd and mysterious loner, defends the innocent while remaining true only to himself.
With his horse and dog at his side, Aatami discovers a shiny mother lode right at the surface before meeting a ragtag band of Nazi soldiers in tanks and trucks and the Finnish women prisoners who service their needs. The Nazis take his gold, and the rest of the movie is devoted to Aatami’s mission to get it back — and to kill every Nazi who gets in his way.
The Finns believe the word sisu defines their national character and has no precise equivalent in other languages. It roughly translates to resoluteness in the face of extreme adversity: an insistence on not giving up. Aatami is the living embodiment of sisu. He is shot, stabbed, and pierced by shrapnel, but he keeps on going, outfoxing the Nazis no matter how outnumbered and outgunned he may be.
The movie, written and directed by Jalmari Helander, is a blast, literally and figuratively. It’s filmed with unselfconscious style in beautiful, bleak blue-and-tan landscapes, and it’s also a tad mystical and weird — for example, the Germans speak English with an accent, but the Finns speak Finnish with subtitles. If you can endure (or even relish) the grisly violence, it’s escapist fun of the highest order.
Which brings me to another violent film, Holy Spider, which is neither escapist nor fun. It’s based on the true story of a serial killer, Saeed Hanaei, who brutally murdered 16 drug-addicted prostitutes in 2000 and 2001 on the streets of Mashhad, a large holy city in northeast Iran. Because of its unflattering depiction of Iranian theocratic governance and sexism, the film was shot in Jordan and financed by Europeans; its director and co-writer, Ali Abbasi, is an Iranian expat who lives in Denmark.
Abbasi adds an essential fictional element to the story: the character Arezoo Rahimi, an intrepid female reporter from the more cosmopolitan capital, Tehran, who investigates Saeed with unimaginable courage — she even pretends to be a prostitute and walks the streets as bait. It is her prodding of local journalists and authorities that results in the killer’s arrest and trial. Rahimi, played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi (her towering performance was awarded Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022), is the bitter feminist conscience of the film. She immediately recognizes the dead-end humanity of the victims and that the so-called holy crusade of the Spider Killer, clearing the streets of sinful women, is just a cloak for his predatory sexual desires. Mehdi Bajestani, the actor who plays Saeed, is haunting in the role. He’s both a family man and a perverted killer, as sensitive and paradoxical as a burly Norman Bates.
Abbasi films some of the murders and Saeed’s imprisonment and sentence with an unblinking eye, scenes that can be difficult to watch and may feel exploitative. But it’s essential to his complex view of the crimes. “My intention was not to make a serial killer movie,” he says in the movie’s press materials. “I wanted to make a movie about a serial killer society.”
Holy Spider is a riveting film and especially relevant in light of the bloody protests by women in Iran against the repressive regime. It plays like a thriller, but it resonates like a cry for justice.
