Fleapit revisited:Sorry To Bother You.

"STICK TO THE SCRIPT"

Writer and director Boots Riley's Sorry To Bother You (I missed it 'in theatres' back in 2018 but caught up on BBC2 recently) is a strange and curious beast of a film. A dark, absurd, comedy (though one with few actual belly laughs) that incorporates elements of horror, sci-fi, surrealism, romcom, and social commentary to tell a story that tackles, obliquely, themes of racism, workplace exploitation, class, and identity.

It's fascinating from start to finish although I never once identified with a single character in it. On the basis that they all seem to be living in a world at one remove from anything that actually exists. A kind of parallel world where normal life takes place alongside fantastical and unbelievable events. It's a form of magical realism but one for the era of populists, social media, and post-truth.

Cassius 'Cash' Green (Lakeith Stanfield) lives in his uncle Sergio's (Terry Crews) San Francisco garage with his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson). Detroit is a struggling artist who wears t-shirts with statements like "THE FUTURE IS FEMALE EJACULATION" emblazoned on them as well as penis earrings. Her art consists of her standing on a stage, half naked, having cellphones, batteries, and fake blood thrown at her.

While Detroit struggles as an artist, Cash simply struggles. To get by, to pay the rent, or to keep his 'bucket' of a car on the road. Even when he lands a job as a telemarketer, selling 'wellness' books and other assorted crap, he finds it difficult to actually make any money. Until, that is, an older colleague - Langston (Danny Glover) - suggests he. and teaches him how to, use his 'white voice'.

RegalView, the firm Cash finds himself working for, have been imagined by Riley in the manner of the sort of organisations that turn up in Spike Jonze or Michael Gondry films (there's a knowing hat tip to this when a character called Michael Dongry briefly appears). Futuristic yet hugely shambolic. The team Cash finds himself working for are headed up by the slovenly Anderson (Robert Longstreet) and the neurotic Diane DeBauchery (Kate Berlant) and aided by the hyperactive gurning floorwalker/motivational speaker Johnny (Michael X. Sommers).

At RegalView, staff are not 'employees'. They're 'team members', 'family' even. But, as so often with companies that employ such platitudinous language, the reality is quite different. Staff are overworked and underpaid and, soon enough, protests form against the sweatshop conditions these team members find themselves subjected to. Either in the streets via a nebulous organisation called the Left Eye Faction or within the office itself in the form of strike action orchestrated by Cash's colleague and friend Squeeze (Steven Yuen).

With Detroit and his long time best friend Salvador (Jermaine Fowler) now employed by RegalView as well this causes tensions for Cash. Not least when his white voice technique of telemarketing sees him ascending the greasy ladder of career advancement at an increasingly rapid clip. He's making sales, high-fiving colleagues, and he's on his way to becoming a 'power caller'.

The ultimate dream, we're told, of any telemarketer - and a dream that brings with it both untold levels of wealth and a whole new level of moral scruples. The power caller world is one of ornate elevators (in which Rosario Dawson's computerised voice offers motivational nuggets like "I hope you didn't masturbate today" and "hold my penis while I piss on your underestimated expectations"), sexual promise, cocaine snorted off plates with pictures of horses called Mr Bobo on them, and parties that dissolve into orgies very quickly.

It's all overseen by a figure called Stevie Lift (Armie Hammer plays him as an acid fried vision of the worst excesses of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk) whose company WorryFree are RegalView's most important, by far, clients and Cash's guide into this new world is an eyepatched character calleed Mr_______ (Omari Hardwick's character's name is bleeped out every time it is mentioned for reasons that are never clear but seem entirely in keeping with the film's bizarre tone).

When Cash enters into the world of the power caller, and even more so when he accidentally enters the wrong toilet, things start to get really weird. That's saying something for a programme that already features protestors wearing 'Have A Cola And Smile Bitch' wigs and an America whose favourite television programme, I Got The Shit Kicked Out Of Me, features women being punched in the face and men being coated head to toe in actual shit.

White voices are provided by the likes of David Cross, Lily James, Patton Oswalt, there's a truly bizarre cameo from Forest Whitaker, there's music by Tune-Yards and Boots Riley's own hip-hop outfit The Coup, and there's a recurrent theme of apples that may be symbolic or may simply be for no reason at all. Sorry To Bother You is not like any film I have seen before. There's a strong narrative that's easy to follow but the world in which Boots Riley has imagined, though not far removed from the one we actually live in, is just the right level of uncanny to make interesting points about life and how we live it at the moment.