I LOVE BOOSTERS - FILM FESTIVAL
Will you love I Love Boosters? It’s the latest film written and directed by Boots Riley. Boosters here are women who regularly shoplift from high fashion stores to re-sell to poorer folks. Set in Oakland, this is a kind of Robin Hood gang who steal from the rich to reassign to the less well off. Starring Keke Palmer as the de facto leader of a group of sassy women of colour, their nemesis is fashion goddess Christie, played with Devil Wears Prada megalomania by Demi Moore. With razor-sharp dialogue and totally off-the-wall filmmaking, the pace is furious and increasingly unhinged. There is a strong undertone of Marxism laced with gobbledegook business speak and dialectical posing.
There are demons, skinless humanoids, dystopian cops and frantic car chases through impossible shopping malls. Imagine the Grand Prix through the Grand Arcade. .We are transported — quite literally, as it turns out — to China, where the workers producing Christie's fantastically expensive clothes endure appalling conditions: pitiful wages, punishing hours and clouds of toxic dust. Here a rebellious factory worker acquires the company's secret teleportation technology, developed, naturally, to save on shipping costs. It is an invention with possibilities far beyond anything its capitalist creators intended.
From this point, reality more or less takes its leave. There are demons, skinless humanoids, dystopian police, impossible shopping malls and frantic car chases that defy the laws of physics, not to mention several laws of cinematic good taste. The special effects veer between dazzling technological sophistication and deliberately cartoonish absurdity.
At the Cambridge Film Festival screening, one of the programmers mentioned that the film had been described as Marxism played out by Looney Tunes. That strikes me as just about right. The battle between workers and bosses, rich and poor, exploiters and exploited is presented as a succession of increasingly outrageous comic set pieces. Throw in a torrent of gobbledegook business jargon, some dialectical posturing and enough visual gags to keep several animators employed for years, and you begin to get the picture.
Does it all work? Well, up to a point. Riley clearly has serious things to say about the exploitation of labour, the grotesque inequalities of global capitalism and the ridiculous excesses of consumer culture. But I did occasionally feel that the political message was being overwhelmed by the sheer extravagance of the filmmaking. When everything is turned up to eleven, there is a danger that nothing quite registers.
Yet perhaps that is to take the whole enterprise too seriously. This is not a sober lecture on the evils of capitalism. It is an anarchic, exuberant assault on the senses, bursting with energy, invention and a quite extraordinary disregard for the conventions of cinema. And it is often very, very funny.
So leave your expectations of realism at the cinema door. Don't worry too much if the plot occasionally disappears down one of its own rabbit holes. Go along in the right spirit, surrender to its frenetic rhythms and allow Boots Riley to weave his gloriously barmy magic. You may not emerge with a clearer understanding of Marxist economics. But you will certainly have experienced one of the wildest cinematic rides of the year. If your experience is like mine, you will love I Love Boosters.