The Boss of It All

So, who is the boss of it all? Lars von Tri­er, that’s who. Tak­ing a brief sojourn from the bril­liant, aus­tere­ly staged guilt-trips of Dogville and Man­der­lay, the great Dane has decid­ed to pro­duce a riotous com­e­dy quick­ie in the mould of The Office, which reveals an endear­ing, even play­ful side to the habit­u­al­ly sub­ver­sive director.

The own­er of a small IT firm, Ravn (Peter Gant­zler), thinks it’s high time to sell up and move on. The trou­ble is, when he start­ed his com­pa­ny he invent­ed a fic­tion­al pat­sy he called ​‘The Boss of it All’ upon whom he could lay the blame for any unpop­u­lar deci­sions. When an Ice­landic firm decide to buy Ravn out, they also insist on nego­ti­at­ing with the ​‘Boss’ face-to-face. He then has to employ a failed actor (the excel­lent Jens Albi­nus) to play the part.

The film sails on a clutch of broad, impro­vised com­ic per­for­mances and an unabashed­ly screw­ball set-up, and we watch through metaphor­i­cal­ly clenched fin­gers as the idi­ot­ic and pompous Albi­nus creeps ever clos­er to that big, final board­room meeting.

It’s filmed in what von Tri­er has coined ​‘Automav­i­sion’, which is, as he has described it, ​“a prin­ci­ple for shoot­ing film devel­oped with the inten­tion of lim­it­ing human influ­ence by invit­ing chance in from the cold”. It’s basi­cal­ly a tech­nique (of sorts) in which cer­tain ele­ments of the cam­era are con­trolled by a com­put­er, and although it adds noth­ing to the movie, it’s sym­bol­ic of the director’s cyn­i­cal atti­tude towards the estab­lished order of film­mak­ing, and how tech­nol­o­gy too often takes prece­dence over actors and story

But beyond all the office-based tom­fool­ery lies a dead­ly seri­ous med­i­ta­tion on the respon­si­bil­i­ties of a direc­tor, the nature of per­for­mance and the trans­fer­ence (and sub­se­quent instinc­tive sub­jec­ti­fi­ca­tion) of ideas from one mind to anoth­er. Take that, Ricky Gervais.