★★★★★
(Alessandra Luciano) In Get Out (Jorden Peele, 2017) Lakeith Stanfield tells Daniel Kaluuya to “get out“. In Boots Riley’s first feature film Sorry to Bother You, he plays Cassius Green (pronounced Cash), a broke black man living in his uncle’s garage who gets a job as telemarketer at Regalview. However, despite always sticking to the script as he is told by his manager, Cassius is failing. Only after adopting his “white voice”, an advise he gets from his colleague Langston (Danny Glover), do his sales increase and he finds himself being promoted to Power Caller on the upper floors of the Regalview building, where you have to maintain your white voice at all times. Thus, both films not only have Stanfield in common but make it clear that in order to be successful you have to be white, one way or another.
(c) Annapurna Pictures
As Cassius is enjoying the perks of his new position, despite the fact that his main and only client is WorryFree, an entity he was formerly opposed to, his friends and girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) are fighting and organising around the battle against the oppressive power of big corporations and corrupt governments by going on strike at Regalview.
Whereas some of the fantasy elements are already being felt from the beginning of the movie – the eerie feeling you get from the Regalview office, the man in the photo that Cassius carries keeps changing position, the white voice is not a distortion of Stanfield’s own voice but his dialogue is dubbed by actor David Cross, creating an odd dissonance between the actor and the dialogue – it is indeed the moment Cassius moves up at Regalview that the film takes a turn for the absurd.
The absurdities are driven to a gross extreme that never feel too far from reality. From Cassius’s client, Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), CEO of WorryFree, an over the top close to ridicule tech visionary that we all know from the likes of Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs, with an even greater lack of ethics than his real world contemporaries, to the reality tv show “I Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Me” where people just get beaten up and humiliated on camera for the pleasure of millions of spectators, to Cassius himself becoming a viral sensation that is turned into a meme and finally spoofed on television that is a direct reference to Kendall Jenner’s tone and colour deaf Pepsi commercial in 2017, to the most nauseating moment where Lift makes Cassius rap because he is black and insists that he must have some “hood stories” to share with his white guests, reminding the audience that black men and women are not only the cheap labour of white America but their bodies are meant for entertainment, cultural exoticism and appropriation.
Sorry to Bother You then is a mix of different genres, lodged somewhere between comedy, science-fiction and fantasy, with clear antifa references that however should not be merely reduced to the activist group. The film exposes the powers that are when a nation state is increasingly but subtly turning fascist. Fascism is not only an ideology, but it is a means to grab and retain power through violence, via the them vs. us rhetoric, the destruction of truth and alternative societal models, in collaboration with governments that allow for unchecked free market and labour laws.
The attack on freedom in Sorry to Bother You as exemplified by WorryFree as a company, a lifestyle and a family model abounds yet is subtle, and the complex subject matters of racism, inequalities and oppression addressed by Boots Riley make the film one of the most original and in depth texts on those subject matters, and would therefore require multiple viewings.
(c) Annapurna Pictures
Indeed, there is so much more to say about the film that I could not fit into this review, like the importance of the city of Oakland, the featured wicker chair where Huey P. Newton co-founder of the Black Panther sat, a deeper analysis into viral internet culture, the wink to Michel Gondry’s films, Tessa Thompson’s earrings or the fun fact that some of the t-shirts she wears are her own from the LGTBQIA+ store Otherwild.
As such, I suggest you make the trip to Cinéma Le Klub in Metz as soon as you can. And if you enjoy the approach Riley takes, may I suggest Get Out, the series Dear White People, as well as Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer „Emotion Picture“, if you have not done so yet.
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