At The Movies: Problemista’s whimsy is wearying, Blitz a conventional WWII drama

Problemista (M18)

98 minutes, opens exclusively at The Projector on Nov 28
★★☆☆☆

The story: Alejandro (Julio Torres) from El Salvador is an aspiring toy designer in New York City. With time running out on his American work visa, he becomes personal assistant to an erratic art critic (Tilda Swinton) as his only hope for a sponsored residency.

Even the singular Swinton is grating, although, in her defence, she is merely acting the part of Elizabeth Ascenci, a screeching harridan in perpetual meltdown and a flaming magenta wig.

Problemista is an archly quirky indie comedy complete with storybook narration.

Saturday Night Live (1975 to present) alumnus Torres writes, directs, co-produces and stars as the childlike hero. A chance encounter leads to Alejandro co-curating a gallery retrospective of 13 egg paintings by Elizabeth’s husband (RZA of the American hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan), who has cryogenically frozen himself with the plan to revive in a future where his work would be better appreciated.

Torres sets this satire of art-world privilege against Alejandro’s existential anxieties, shuffling with his backpack around the city from degrading gigs – his unpaid “internship” under Elizabeth will not contribute to his rent – to the purgatorial visa offices.

The many fantasy flourishes, which include Craigslist personified as a black junkyard genie, see him trapped in a suite of escape rooms while an hourglass counts down to his deportation.

Torres has a detailed feel of what it is like to be a foreigner in limbo, hanging on to his dreams. The Salvadoran-American comedian’s feature debut is, after all, an autobiography, and his alter-ego might have made for a credible underdog if he were not affecting to be a faux adorable one.

Hot take: The whimsy is wearying and gets in the way of a real story on the surreal immigrant experience.

Blitz (PG13)

108 minutes, available on Apple TV+
★★★☆☆

The story: During Germany’s 1940 bombing campaign over the United Kingdom, hundreds of thousands of children in London were evacuated to the countryside. George (Elliott Heffernan) is a nine-year-old who jumps off the train mid-journey, determined to make his way home.

British film-maker Steve McQueen explored sex addiction in Shame (2011), and is the only winner of both an Academy Award (for 2013’s 12 Years A Slave) and the Turner Prize.

All of which is to say, Blitz is a World War II boyhood adventure uncharacteristically conventional for the lauded artist.

George is crucially biracial. Saoirse Ronan plays his single mum Rita, a worker in a munitions factory, and his father was a Grenadian immigrant (CJ Beckford).

The child’s picaresque epic odyssey towards the mother-and-son reunion provides him with an education in identity and empire as he meets a Nigerian air raid warden (Benjamin Clementine), is conscripted by a gang of cockney looters (Stephen Graham and Kathy Burke) and narrowly escapes a flooded bunker.

His black British wartime experience is intercut with Rita’s own trials under bombardment, barred from the underground shelters along with the rest of the working class.

The racial and social divisions debunk the mythologised “blitz spirit” of English solidarity against fascism.

But there is never any sense of real danger to the boy hero despite McQueen’s skilful recreations of the historical scenarios. In his Holocaust documentary Occupied City (2023) on Amsterdam, his adopted city in the Netherlands, the director mapped contemporary footage over memories of the Nazi occupation, and much less is there here any such creative vision.

Hot take: A sentimental period drama that could have been made by any competent journeyman.