It's not what you would expect from a modern movie. Its original style doesn't match an interesting plot, but, if you put the latter aside, the former is then extremely well executed, to the point where one can evaluate merely parting from it.
The movie tells the story of how an immigrant from El Salvador, Alejandro, wants to become a toy maker in the United States, and the ups and downs that follow that complicated process. While applying for a Job, she finds harsh-spoken and enthusiastically rude Elizabeth, who, after her husband decides to freeze himself in a cryogenics company due to terminal illness, needs money by selling uninspiring avant garde Egg paintings which his husband, Bobby, painted.
The quirkiness follows the weird style and patterns in which this very untraditional film tells such a very traditional tale: there's a female narrator chillingly speaking our story, there's the saturated colors often juxtaposed with a bright, blue sky, and this overall sense that everything is a toy, including the concept itself of the movie; there's Alejandro with his strange ways of walking like a first person video game personage, there's the odd intense and annoying persona of Elizabeth always present, but there's also this beautifully crafted scenes where, in place of a film, you have this theatrical performances in which Elizabeth is often represented as a Hydra. To me, watching this film with nothing else but the intention of experiencing a modern and contemporary style play out is worth your time, and if you're in a good mood, you wouldn't regret it.
But all in all, when we indulge into the story itself, instead of a harsh critic into the difficult nuances that immigrants go through, we hear about the pursuit of the impossible. From this point of view, the film itself is not realistic at all, and if you're seeking a realistic worldview where a main character's journey's motto is "I am in pain, for I have failed", in which we as viewers are left compassionately crying for their misfortune, then this movie isn't it. When looking for a movie about poverty and the dark side of things, you don't make it in a quirky and funny, and even touching the superficial, kind of way, but you make it in the style of movies like Ayka, in which we as viewers can feel the point of view of those most unfortunate, and we are then compelled to help them due to us really understanding their circumstances.
We hear but only a few successful stories of immigrants actually making it, and we don't hear about the rest. I would have wished then, that this movie represented the rest with actual compassion and warmth, instead of the few. It fails to give a compelling account at the actual pain experienced by those who desire, and more often than not, fail in the process of actual immigration. Viewing the movie in this regard, we end up with the message that: nothing is impossible, you just have to fight and fight, while in reality, sometimes we run into a wall impossible to cross, and running into a fantasy is not the fix to our problems.
I believe the director has a lot of potential to make great films in the future, if he takes into account even deeper ups and deeper downs, such as is the case of Barry Lyndon, in which both misfortune and glory are represented through a realistic and convincing lens, so we can feel not just the realisation of the surreal and the impossible, but also, the darkness that this realisation conveys.
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