Finding humor in tragedy is a habit that those born into a literal and metaphorical fault zone quickly become accustomed to. Somedays the sheer absurdity of your circumstances can only be made sense of by a well-crafted joke or a timely pun, and it’s probably why, growing up in Turkey, I learned that a perennial sense of collective misfortune breeds comedy. “That’s why Europeans are so unfunny,” my elementary school teachers told me matter-of-factly. “It’s because they have no quotidian sense of impending tragedy.”
This generational wisdom is corroborated by Salvadoran-American stand-up comedian Julio Torres’ debut feature Problemista, a semi-autobiographical surrealist comedy tinged with Torres’ signature deadpan humor, situated somewhere between the cringe comedy of Nathan Fielder and the absurdist antics of Tim Robinson. The film follows Alejandro, an aspiring toymaker who has immigrated from El Salvador to New York to pursue his dreams of working for Hasbro, leaving his ever-supportive mother behind to worry in his wake. After losing his caretaker job at Freezecorp – a fictitious tech startup that rents out cryogenic chambers to a range of wealthy clientele to hibernate into the future –π Alejandro is given a deadline of 30 days to find a sponsor for his work visa in order to stay in the country. With the upturning of an imaginary hourglass, our endearingly reticent protagonist begins his race against time to find a way out of the Kafkaesque maze of American immigration law and escape the imminent threat of deportation. An anxiety-inducing countdown commences, at the end of which looms the greater threat of legal erasure – one that many hopeful-would-be-citizens know all too well.
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In the current – dare I say hellish – landscape of our globalized world, wired together by discrete networks of bureaucratic power that remain invisible to those outside of their realm of influence, we’ve become habituated to the idea that the geopolitical standing of the ground one learns to walk on determines their life’s trajectory. Most people take their freedom to roam the world for granted until they decide it’s time to settle down and find their footing in a destination equal parts exotic and homely. Those of us who don’t have the luxury to simply ‘go back where we came from’ are left to navigate the convoluted maze of visa application fees, residence permit appointments and citizenship eligibility requirements on our own, under the pitying looks of government officials who resent us for our misguided attempts at legal assimilation.
It goes without saying that this path of least resistance is reserved exclusively for those with time and money to spare, as a means of smoothing out the rocky cross to the other side, where the grass is purportedly greener. But when the difference between risking departure and being left behind is a question of choosing life over death, the illusion of individual choice dissipates. As one of the many hopeful refugees braving the journey across the green border between Poland and Belarus in Agniezska Holland’s eponymous epic points out indignantly: their only sin is having been born to the worst passport in the world. It is the global stamp of disapproval that justifies the suffering they endure at the hands of border patrol officers and in the name of national security. Such is the fate of the designated ‘illegal’ immigrant.
But what of the one permitted through the pearly gates of that ever-elusive Garden of Eden of the West that promises salvation in endless financial opportunity? Their burden to bear, though at first glance remarkably less tinged with hostility, is one of a more implicit sort: they contort their bodies to fit the rubber-stamped mold of the model minority and tread softly on shaky ground so as to make as little sound as possible when entering the Room Where It Happens – see Alejandro, channelling his discomfiture in a bouncy gait as he makes his way through the streets of New York from temp job to temp job.
As such the immigrant is more wary of their circumstances than people tend to give them credit for: they recognize the absurdity of their predicament but with the limited options they have at their disposal are unable to vanquish it. They have no choice but to comply with the nonsensical rules that are imposed on them as a procedural measure. They are given the impossible task of making sense out of nonsense; a cohesive narrative out of a tangle of open-ended storylines. To hone the absurdity of Alejandro’s plight Problemista juxtaposes the docile immigrant with the entitled native outcast through the anti-antagonist Elizabeth (an uncharacteristically bedraggled Tilda Swinton), who invokes her power as a born and bred American citizen with the promise to sponsor Alejandro’s work visa in exchange for freelance work. Immediately we recognize the murky power imbalance obscured by the quirky narrative and the colorful set pieces. Elizabeth is unkempt, loud and constantly on the lookout for someone to blame for her self-induced misery: in other words, she becomes a real “problemista” for anyone and everyone who comes into contact with her; the stark opposite of the infantile Alejandro who acquiesces to sleeping on the couch of his Bushwick rental and takes up odd jobs to make ends meet.
Nevertheless, Elizabeth appears like an unseemly beacon of light guiding the way out of the fog of uncertainty that threatens to smother Alejandro’s dreams of becoming a toy maker for good. She represents an overt if unlikely figure of hope, galvanized by her obsession with curating an art exhibition for her late husband’s bizarrely sentimental egg paintings. The symbolism of the eggs is fairly straightforward: they are meant to evoke safety, preservation, (re)birth; the physical embodiment of the motherly principle that through diligent care and lenient patience one can push through the hard exterior of the outer shell and find salvation in that coveted first gulp of air.
So it’s no surprise that eggs appear as a recurring motif of promised freedom in another contemporary narrative revolving around the lived experience of immigrants, braving the journey to the Global North with the hope of starting anew. In Ben Sharrock’s 2020 feature Limbo, a forlorn group of asylum seekers wait out the processing of their refugee claims on a remote Scottish island, spending their days watching box sets of Friends and being subjected to government-mandated cultural awareness classes to better assimilate into “civilized” society once on the mainland. At one point Farhad, one of the hopeful British citizens-to-be from Afghanistan, indulges in his fantasy of having “eggs sunny side up” every morning before work.
Longing for the customary stability of a 9‑to‑5 job and the everyday rituals that proliferate around it. It strikes the Western viewer as strange for someone to long for what is such a trivial part of daily life for the average cinemagoer. After all, who would dream of having a bullshit job that offers little to no satisfaction in the long run even if they got to have eggs for breakfast every day? But the average Western viewer may not recognise the lack of a viable alternative for people who have been subjected to brutality beyond their comprehension. It is a seemingly naïve yet emotionally true sentiment: the value of routine comforts one takes for granted can only be appreciated by those who have been deprived of them.
Much like Farhad’s fantasy of waking up and donning a suit for a thankless office job on the dot every morning, when I was in high school I had a recurring fantasy of leaving the violent political turmoil of my hometown behind for the pristine monotony of the American suburbs. As the idiom goes, it was my happy place. I sketched out the residential cul-de-sac I’d live on in my head, the extracurricular clubs I’d join and the temp jobs I’d take on during summer breaks. I wanted to lose myself in outdated ideations of the American pastoral, a vision exacerbated by the films of John Hughes and the high school teen movie craze of the early 2000s. Like Farhad, I used the mass media generated by the American culture industry to fill my fantasies with a quirky cast of characters who didn’t have to actively worry about bomb threats on their way to school or the abysmal state of a national economy that drove hordes of young people to suicide as a last resort.
Fantasy not only functions as an escape route for many desperate to flee the dire straits they were born into but also as a narrative device of expression. Surreal elements are interwoven with the plot to bring a much-needed touch of humor to the ravaging realities of unwanted ‘foreigners’ clinging onto the hope that somewhere out there must be something better than what they’ve had the courage to leave behind. From Italian auteur, Giacomo Abbruzzese’s luminous debut feature Disco Boy riddled with elements of magical realism to Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated epic Io Capitano, a common feature of contemporary cinema centered around the journey of the immigrant seems to be its frequent application of surrealism as a storytelling device.
It’s as if these fictionalized accounts of migration demand some semblance of the unreal to come across as psychologically feasible, both for the on-screen protagonists who are going through the unimaginable feat of traveling across the world for a brighter future and the audience who is experiencing it through them. It requires a certain degree of suspension of disbelief on the part of the viewer not only for the sake of emotional resonance but also to qualify as a viable portrayal of the conflictive stages of grief one goes through in such personal states of emergency. Whether it be the contrived maze of greige office rooms that entrap Alejandro in an illogical cycle of administrative procedures in Problemista or the imagined encounter between siblings separated by war in Limbo, these otherworldly cinematic elements not only propel the emotional gravity of the stories they tell forward but also function as corrective measures of agency for their heroes, left alone to navigate their way out of a world reeling before their eyes.
On the other end of the spectrum are films which categorically abstain from falling back on the aesthetic shortcuts of a superior reality for the sake of driving home the point of gritty realism. They bring the audience back to Earth so to speak, forcing them to reckon with their own responsibility as tax-paying citizens of markedly xenophobic governments. The human cost of the ongoing humanitarian crisis is brought to the forefront of the narrative foregoing didactic moralism. Such is the case made by the aforementioned Green Border, a devastating portrayal of the intertwining lives of a flock of Middle Eastern and African refugees who become entrapped in No Man’s Land on the Belarus-Poland border. With no home to go back to, we watch as families and children are passed back and forth between the opposing border control checkpoints, the civilian casualties of a cruel game of political ping-pong. For the entirety of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime Green Border does not pull any punches but it is the epilogue that bears the brunt of its championed cause: As the same border patrol officers we’ve watched violently deny access to ‘illegal’ migrants mere minutes ago welcome Ukrainian refugees with open arms onto their land, guiding them into the busses on route to the safe haven of the EU we can’t help but cringe at the hypocrisy of their perfunctory sympathy. The message is clear: the laws that adjudicate who is and who isn’t allowed beyond the border are ultimately proven to be arbitrary.
The surge in transgressive cinematic narratives that characterize the perpetual precarity of the ‘modern’ immigrant as their modus vivendi harkens back to our current political moment in time. Initially welcomed in as a brazen show of legislative goodwill, come election season they inevitably become the scapegoat of every economic downturn and the de facto target of horrifying political campaigns that aim to curb the threat of rising immigration rates. Should the recent revival of neo-fascist sentiments around the world incentivize a collective reaction, let these exceptional pieces of filmmaking be a stark reminder of the pressing need to create and engage with art that blurs the line between what is and what isn’t, guiding the way toward what could be for all of us involved.
