The Boss of It All (2006)

The owner of an IT firm wants to sell up. The trouble is that when he started his firm he invented a nonexistent company president to hide behind when unpopular steps needed taking. When potential purchasers insist on negotiating with the "Boss" face to face the owner has to take on a failed actor to play the part. The actor suddenly discovers he is a pawn in a game that goes on to sorely test his (lack of) moral fiber. System Requirements:Run Time: 96 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 796019804813 Manufacturer No: 80481 Product Description

achieves some interest after a faltering first half

Ravn (Peter Gantzler) is a Danish entrepreneur who, due to an almost pathological need to be liked by everyone, has trouble effectively managing the employees who work for him. To overcome this deficiency, he devises an elaborate ruse, one that involves hiring an out-of-work actor (Jens Albinus) to pose as a fictitious company president whose job it will be to both bark out the orders and deflect any blowback that might come his way from the disgruntled workers. At first, Kristoffer goes along with the plan, convincing the staff that he is indeed the CEO of the firm and that he actually knows what it is he's talking about when it comes to implementing and enforcing company policy. Yet, slowly, Kristoffer comes to suspect that Ravn may not be quite as pure in heart or benign in his motives as the young actor was initially led to believe. Eventually, Kristoffer has to decide just how far he's willing to go with this charade if carrying it to its completion means backstabbing the very people he's actually come to care about in the short time he`s been working there.

Like virtually all of Lars Van Trier's work, the highly satirical "The Boss of it All," is an acquired taste, one that demands a degree of patience from the viewer - along with a rather high threshold for pretentiousness - before it can be fully understood and appreciated. And, indeed, the first half of the film makes for rather rough sailing as we attempt to descry, through all the verbal fog and cinematic obscurity, just what it is that Van Trier is trying to accomplish. We know it has something to do with skewering the whole corporate-world-mentality thing, but the extreme verbosity and self-conscious filmmaking style go a long ways towards muddling the message.

But, damned if the whole thing doesn`t somehow manage to pull itself together long about the midway point and we cruise safely to our admittedly unexpected destination. Part of the reason for the turnabout is that Van Trier is finally able to crystallize his theme once Kristoffer realizes he has a serious moral decision to make and when it starts becoming unclear which "boss" is really pulling the strings - i.e. who is the puppeteer and who the puppet, who the scenarist and who the actor - in this oddball relationship.

I've never been overly fond of Van Trier's self-conscious stylistic hallmarks - jump-cuts, catawampus framing, self-referential, film-within-a-film narration - since they serve mainly to call attention to the filmmaker and to throw us out of the drama he's showing us. Still, there are moments when the dark, tongue-in-cheek humor successfully hits its mark, and Van Trier does a nice job dovetailing his parody of the theater into his satire on business. And the unexpected ending demonstrates that none of us is truly above selling out those we care for if the price is high enough for doing so. June 28, 2008

A stone on the road!

The figure of Lars von Triers has always aroused expectations around every filmic project he undertakes. But in this opportunity, this work finds him with great wishes but with lack of inspiration, a static comedy that indeed has brilliant moments but nothing else.

An actor is hired by the owner of a company to pave the way in order to materialize a sharp plan.

Triers plays hard with the peaks and lows of that mediocre actor, who is discovered by his employers since the same beginning of the farce.

Uninspired movie.
January 8, 2008

one joke

I guess you could say I'm a Lars von Trier fan, this being the fifth film of his I've seen (the best by far is Breaking the Waves), but this one was an utter disappointment. I was curious to see how he would pull off a comedy, but there is only one joke told seventeen different ways. I laughed the first time. The actors, who do their best, are wasted. The camera roams around looking for something to do. In short, a good one to skip. October 27, 2007

Deliberately Amateurish, but Funny All the Same.

Danish director Lars von Trier gets experimental again in "The Boss of It All", but this time he aims to make us laugh. This corporate comedy sends up actors, artistic pretensions, and the venerable tradition of passing the buck. Mr. Ravn (Peter Gantzler) founded a successful technology company but was loath to take on the role of President. So he invented a fictional company president who is always abroad, concealing his true role even from the company's "six seniors", its first and most valuable employees. Now Ravn needs to close a deal with an Icelandic businessman who insists on dealing with the President. So Ravn hires Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), an out-or work actor of little talent and many pretensions, to be the President for a week.

This absurd set-up creates ample opportunity for hilarity: The staff is easily convinced that Kristoffer is President despite his ignorance and inarticulate prattle. He must negotiate conversations with the six seniors, who have each been given a different impression of him by Gavn, without letting on that he doesn't know them. He gradually comes to realize that Gavn created the President to take the blame for his unpopular decisions, while Gavn took credit for more generous policies. The men are more alike than Kristoffer would like to think, as they both crave attention and acceptance. "The Boss of It All" is insightful, comical, and almost believable.

The film doesn't look good, though. Lars von Trier employed Automavision to frame all the shots. In other words, he let a computer decide where to put the camera. "Decide" might not be the best word. The computer selects randomly. A silly exercise in my view -and a false one, since the director set the computer's parameters (to avoid filming a blank wall or ceiling), and the actors can see the camera, so they maneuver to get into frame. Lars von Trier does things like this to amuse himself. In this case, the framing looks amateurish but not unusual, so I don't see a point to it except to relieve von Trier of the burden of framing his own shots. I was more struck by the problems with color temperature, which are distracting and ugly. In Danish with subtitles.

The DVD (IFC 2007): Bonus features are a theatrical trailer, 2 mockumentaries, and 3 featurettes. In "The Actors (and the Journalist) of It All" (22 min) the cast gives mock interviews to a "journalist". Occasionally funny, but much too long. In Danish with subtitles. "The Foreigners of It All" (6 min) are mock interviews with the 3 actors who played the American employee and the Icelanders. "The Making of the Boss of It All" (5 min) interviews Lars von Trier. In "The Director of It All" (6 min), von Trier talks about his inspiration for the scape goat idea. "Automavision: The New Dogma" (6 min) interviews von Trier and Peter Hjorth about Automavision. Bonus features are in English except where otherwise noted. Subtitles are available for the film in English, English SDH, and Spanish. September 25, 2007

The Office on acid - a hilarious dark comedy about arbitrary and autocratic corporate decision making

Danish auteur Lars von Trier turns his acidic wit to office politics, with the overall message that while the true boss of it all that really runs the show is money, capitalism American style, what most of us really want is not the truth but a convenient and self-serving fiction. Along the way von Trier dishes up a scenario that is endlessly inventive and hilarious -- and that in its ruthless look at the stupidity of bureaucracy harks back to his underseen television miniseries Riget/Kingdom. As in that series, he includes himself directly here as a narrator to comment on his approach and on his expectations from the audience -- reminding us both directly and indirectly that his aim is not to please or to edify but to exploit and manipulate and offend at the same time as he entertains. This is a lighter, and less ambitious, project than anything he has done for a while, but it is no less intriguing for that.

As in many of his films, where he deliberately imposes upon himself a specific constraint (as in his Dogme film "The Idiots" or as in "Dogville" and "Manderlay" where he gets rid of the sets, or as he imposes upon his teacher Jorgen Leth in "The Five Obstructions), he set up a very specific constraint upon himself in the making of this film that defines in large part its style and look. He made use of a technology dubbed "Automavision" -- a camera whose angle and exposure are set randomly by computer -- and the effect is to add a jumpy and kinetic quality to the film that goes against the standard Hollywood style continuity editing and includes jump cuts and non-matching lighting, etc. Somehow it works, in part because of the strength of the acting and the script, but in part because the awkwardness of the style seems to match the story perfectly. In fact, it works more than just as an aesthetic complement to the story: it ties directly to the theme of the story in so far as "Automavision" functions as a kind of "boss of it all" -- that can be blamed for the apparent arbitrariness of some of the editing and coloring choices. The true "boss of it all" that von Trier suggests really runs everything is in fact the not-entirely arbitrary but still haphazard fluctuation of the market -- and "Automavision" works as a nice metaphor for that.

This is not, strictly speaking, a masterpiece and will certainly be regarded as one of Lars von Trier's lesser works -- I think it can be said that all of his works are flawed in some way, but this seems to be part of a deliberate effort on his part to introduce flaws. His work as a whole still remains some of the most inventive and compelling in recent cinema -- and for that reason alone, combined with the fact that it is, given an allowance for a certain kind of humor, one of the funniest films to appear so far this year, it is definitely worth watching. September 22, 2007

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