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Review: ‘Fantasmas’ Journeys to the Center of Julio Torres’s Mind

Review: ‘Fantasmas’ Journeys to the Center of Julio Torres’s Mind


The title of Julio Torres’s new HBO sequence, “Fantasmas,” is a means of giving a reputation to a factor you possibly can’t see. In an early scene Torres, enjoying a model of himself, pitches Crayola executives on a crayon for “the colour clear,” which he suggests naming after the Spanish phrase for “ghosts.” The executives hesitate; clear, they are saying, isn’t a colour. “Then what do you name this?” he asks, gesturing on the air. “The house between us. The emotional house, I imply.”

The scene is typical Torres, absurd, fantastical, a contact wistful. It additionally suggests a great way to explain his hard-to-pin down comedian sensibility. As the pleasant “Fantasmas” reiterates, he’s drawing with crayons which can be in no person else’s field.

Over the previous a number of years, Torres has established himself as a premier comedian fabulist. In “Los Espookys,” the unjustly short-lived supernatural comedy Torres cocreated for HBO, he imagined a fictional Latin American nation the place magic-realist mysteries unfolded. In the 2019 particular “My Favorite Shapes by Julio Torres,” he imagined tales a couple of sequence of objects — cubes, toys, collectible figurines — that rolled previous him on a conveyor belt like whimsical sushi.

The six-episode “Fantasmas,” which begins on Friday, lies someplace between these two works structurally whereas borrowing components of his earlier work as a author for “Saturday Night Live.” It’s extra digressive than a sitcom, extra serial than a sketch comedy. Think of it as a sketch fantasy.

“Fantasmas” locations his character, Julio, in a stage-set model of New York City situated a couple of parallel universes left of the one we all know. In this one, the nightlife features a membership for homosexual hamsters; an “incorporeal providers” firm entices prospects to “free your self from the burden of getting a physique”; and the subway public deal with system broadcasts that “the following F prepare will arrive in 178 minutes.” (OK, that one could roughly approximate precise New Yorkers’ expertise.)

Torres completists will observe robust echoes of his current movie, “Problemista,” during which he performed an El Salvadoran immigrant in New York scrambling to safe his work visa. The film even started equally, along with his character pitching eccentric toy concepts to Hasbro, together with a Barbie-like doll along with her fingers crossed behind her again to create “rigidity.”

But “Fantasmas” operates extra on the extent of dream and fantasy, the place Torres works finest. Here, the search driving the story is Julio’s want for a “Proof of Existence” card in an effort to discover a new condominium, which shifts the immigration story of “Problemista” into existential absurdity. (The plot additionally includes his seek for a lacking earring the precise dimension of an oyster-shaped birthmark just under his ear.)

The shaggy-dog story is generally a car for a sequence of imaginative detours. We meet Julio’s robotic assistant, Bibo (voiced by Joe Rumrill), who desires of being a performer; Vanesja (Martine), a efficiency artist posing as Julio’s agent; and Chester (Tomás Matos), a taxi driver whose private ride-share app permits patrons entry to the lavatory codes at “varied Chipotle places.” (The huge supporting forged additionally contains alumni of “Los Espookys” and “Fantasmas.”)

For everybody in “Fantasmas,” the boundary between dream and actuality is porous. Julio has a behavior of “going into himself” — stepping out of his each day life right into a stage-set thoughts house that’s as actual to him as actuality. But the sequence additionally imagines the inside lives of peripheral characters, like an imperious however secretly insecure customer-service agent. You often is the hero or the villain of the story, “Fantasmas” suggests, however all of us have entry to an inside wonderland of magic.

Amid Julio’s rambling quest for his earring and safety, “Fantasmas” intersperses a sequence of sketch-like set items. One invents an “Alf”-style sitcom about an alien who strikes in with a human household and falls in love with the dad; one other tells the story of the letter Q (Steve Buscemi), imagined as an avant-garde provocateur cursed with being positioned too early within the alphabet, among the many extra “accessible” letters.

Some of the extra “S.N.L.”-like bits don’t repay as effectively, like a working gag during which Bowen Yang performs an elf suing Santa Claus for unpaid labor. But even the extra conventional-seeming gags, like a “Real Housewives” parody (starring Rachel Dratch, Cole Escola, Rosie Perez and Emma Stone), have a means of taking surprising turns into the uncanny.

Your expertise of “Fantasmas” could rely in your style for Torres’s model of offbeat riffs and fanciful imagery. But whether or not you discover it tickling or twee, there’s substance at its coronary heart: the precariousness of residing on the margins of society; the stresses of the hustle-culture financial system; the expertise of being nonconforming, be it in gender or profession or inventive phrases.

At coronary heart, “Fantasmas” is a dream story concerning the concrete actuality of how robust it may be to keep up and home a physique on this world. Finding house for one’s self is a stressor that may present itself in desires, just like the one which New Yorkers typically report of discovering a secret door to a hidden room inside one’s condominium.

Julio Torres’s thoughts is somewhat like that door. Take a couple of steps down from actuality, dangle a left and switch the knob, and all of a sudden you’re in a brand new world.

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Written by EGN NEWS DESK

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