Boots Riley. "Sorry to bother you" Boots Riley's social comedy, first shown in January 2018 at the Sundance Festival, in November landed in the top ten independent films of the year according to the US National Council of Film Critics. Considering that this is the debut screenplay and directorial work, moreover, consisting entirely of Marxist meanings, the warm welcome given to it is as surprising as it is encouraging.
The 47-year-old musician, the leader of the left-wing group The Coup, has created a superb satire on American (and any other) society. The main character of the film is black unemployed Cassius Green. His role is played by Lakeith Stanfield, a year earlier noted in the film “Get Out” by Jordan Peel, another promising debutant-African-American (Oscar Award for Best Screenplay), who managed to perform at the same time on the field of spectator cinema (“masscult”) and the field of problematic, critical cinema, combining in one consistent whole a social message mixed with anti-racism, with genre signs of comedy, horror and fiction. In a certain sense, the picture of Riley is fantastic, or rather phantasmagorical.
The tape has a number of undoubted advantages. Unlike most African-American filmmakers, including Spike Lee and Jordan Peel, Riley’s focus is not solely on black issues. Yes, black people in the United States are second-class: they tend to get low-paying, humiliating jobs, live poor, dress poor, drive cheap cars and get out of debt – and Riley has it all reflected. Yes, Greene gets a job at a telemarketing company, where he will be told that in order to succeed and grow his career, he must change the voice of a black man to the voice of a white man. Yes, the guy from the black ghetto in the eyes of the establishment, whose worldview and values are expressed by the executive director of the fictional corporation “No Cares” Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), is synonymous with a brainless rapper, good for nothing except the performance of impromptu and recitatives.
However, blacks do not make up the majority among Cassius' telemarketing colleagues, that is, among America's socially disadvantaged employees, the precariat. Hispanics, Indians, Asians, whites work here, while one of the most monstrous figures in the picture, the manager of the “super sales” department, is an African-American. Riley’s point is that it is not a matter of color, that the population of any country is made up of two, and no more, “nations” whose name is the oppressed and the oppressors. By the way, the main characters of the film have speaking surnames corresponding to their social position: lift in English - not only "lift", but also "raise", "promotion", as well as "theft"; green - not only "green", but also "immature", "trustful", and also "vegetable".
The complete coincidence of this latter, contained in the epithet, characteristics with the character of Cassius will be revealed as the plot unfolds, and here we come close to the second important virtue of the tape “Sorry for the Trouble”: Riley does not idealize the wage workers of the “first world” with their class-deformed, “stitched” logic of late capitalism consciousness. Using the example of Cassius, he shows how easily a modern man from unprivileged strata, rising up the career ladder, becomes bourgeois, how easily as a result he sacrifices former social ties, solidarity with former colleagues, even love.
As a Marxist, he knows that Marxism is not a religion, and the working class is not an icon to pray for. Especially when we are dealing with the working class of the capitalist metropolis, the United States, which has lost all revolutionary potential. And although screen workers employed by the No Cares Corporation are not envious, although they work in conveyor conditions, in incubator-like workshops, and although they pay with uniforms, genetically modified food and a bed for two people in a dormitory, it is not Pakistan, Honduras or Côte d’Ivoire, whose proletariat works 12 hours in barbed-wire factories, lives in barracks and dies prematurely of poverty and disease.
The third number in the list of advantages of the film should put a clear understanding of the prospects of the world socialist movement, and whatever you say, these prospects are deplorable. The confusion, impotence of the left is personified in “Sorry to Worry” by a girl Cassius named Detroit (as you know, Detroit is one of the poorest cities in the United States at the moment, famous, among other things, for the fact that in 1967 the bloodiest racial riots in American history broke out here). An artist and activist who consistently defends revolutionary views, she finds no understanding either from Cassius or from the artistic bohemian. When asked about the meaning of her installation in the form of an African continent, she says that she wants to talk about exploitation, about how we all fight it, about love, laughter, beauty, about how they remain in peace despite capitalism, which began with the slavery of Africans. But Cassius, without listening to her, only nods. At the opening of the exhibition, she arranges a heppenning: she invites the public to launch blood-filled balls, used ammunition and mobile phones into it. The action has a deep message. Coltan is used in the production of mobile and other electronic devices. 80% of the world’s reserves are in the Congo. It is because of him in Africa for many years has not stopped the war, called “world coltan”. The population of not only the Congo, but also a number of neighboring states is experiencing famine, epidemics, high infant mortality and other disasters caused by devastation, so that the satiated inhabitants of the “first world” and the less well-fed, and yet not poor, inhabitants of the capitalist semi-periphery, such countries as Belarus, Russia or Ukraine, could freely satisfy the needs of various devices imposed by advertising. But none of those present take Detroit’s action seriously, believing it to be another artistic twist.
The anti-capitalist uprising in the film will still happen, only it will be raised not by workers, but ... (spoiler). And this surreal, obviously insane image, as if invented, as they say, “on cigarette butt” is another evidence of the confusion of the Western left, the left of the “first world”, to which the director himself belongs, who understand that socio-economic changes are vital, but cannot find around themselves a class capable of a genuine revolutionary gesture.
The comedy “Sorry to Worry” was released in the United States in limited release – only 16 theaters, but the film, as if contrary to the social pessimism inherent in it, went to the audience, and the rental was expanded to 805 venues. In total, the picture collected more than $ 17 million with a budget of 3.2 million. From this, and from the fact that the IMDB rated her at 7, certain conclusions follow regarding the ideological mood of the American public. The mood of our post-Soviet public can be judged by the rating on Kinopoisk (only 6.3), as well as by the reaction of 55 Russian critics (see the survey of the magazine "Art of Cinema"), only three of whom indicated "Sorry for the concern" among the best films of the year.
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