Director Lars von Trier ditches the pretensions but keeps his misanthropy in The Boss of it All, a surprisingly sharp and witty comedy about office life gone haywire.
Director Lars von Trier ditches the pretensions but keeps his misanthropy in The Boss of it All, a surprisingly sharp and witty comedy about office life gone haywire.
Lars von Trier's black comedy The Boss of It All (Direktøren for Det Hele) concerns an IT company owner who -- in need of a figurehead to "hide behind" when confronted with employee problems -- invented the personage of a CEO during the startup period for his corporation. The scheme worked for a surprisingly long period, but when the time arrives to sell the business, massive problems arise -- for the prospective buyers insist on only negotiating with the CEO, in person. Thus, the owner further
extends the ruse, by hiring a down-and-out actor to impersonate the chief officer. With Direktøren for Det Hele, von Trier uses a new means of filmmaking for this film: Automavision, whereby filming is done with an "automatic randomized camera" that selects the shots. It became a means for Von Trier to "clean up" his approach to directorial work and reconnect with his own love of filmmaking. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi
Von Trier has evidently been watching The Office, and replicates both its soulless setting and fly-on-the-desk camera-style, not to mention the Brentian fear of being unpopular.
Von Trier may be commenting on the mechanical, dehumanised nature of corporate decision-making, or of Hollywood filmmaking. Maybe he's just being whimsical. It's always hard to tell with this joker-provocateur. And always completely fascinating.
Despite roguish interventions from Von Trier himself (in voiceover, and on screen), the movie has more in common with Working Girl and Trading Places than anything from Europe's leading auteur. Which, it seems, is a lucky, liberating thing.
A movie that manages to be both brilliantly witty and delightfully subversive - not least for reportedly entrusting all its cinematography to a computer.
For all the sleights of hand its director conjures up, this is an undeniably slight affair. But it's still a sublimely entertaining one from a maverick confident enough in his abilities to make fun of his previous work and his agent provocateur persona.
I think The Boss of it All is the only von Trier film I truly dislike. Breaking the Waves was another, initially, and though I definitely still have my misgivings about it a second viewing sort of brought me around on the film's merits. This is a marginally clever treatment of viewership and an unconventional look at
comedy in general, but in the scope of his filmography I don't think it really offers anything new. The idea of him creating a comedy so heavily reliant on cliche that he himself has to apologize through narration for the film is sort of interesting, but the novelty doesn't sustain 98 minutes' worth of viewing. It's funny how intent can so radically change a comedy's reception. This is, all told, the most generic office comedy of errors you could possibly imagine, and some people seem to think it's exceptionally funny. It's really not even remotely on its own terms, with von Trier's lampshading providing the only real chuckles, and even that isn't all that inspired. Not recommended, unless you're hellbent on watching all of his films.
Unlike many, I don't feel The Boss of it all is a departure from Von Trier's typical work or that it's his worst to date. It reminds me a lot of The Idiots in many ways, probably helped by the brilliant performance by Jens Albinus but also because it's just as funny, often uncomfortably so. It is probably destined to
be compared with The Office though, a lazy comparison of an over-hyped series.
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