© IFC First Take
The Boss of It All, directed by Lars von Trier
I saw this at the ICA last night, and it's almost a really good film. Ravn, boss of a small IT company, doesn't dare take responsibility for tough decisions, so for years he's told his staff that the mean, stingy, hard-faced "boss of it all", based in the US, is the man to blame for all those nasty rules and refusals they've suffered, while Ravn is the big friendly bear doing his best to hold things together. But when an Icelandic buyer makes an offer for the firm, he insists on meeting this "boss of it all" before completing the deal. So Ravn (played by Peter Gantzler) hires an actor, Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) to play the part. Which is fine - except that Kristoffer is obsessed with the existential, theoretical side of acting, too obsessed to simply do a basic job; and the more he finds out about what's really happening and what's at stake in the sale, the more tempted he is to sabotage the deal.
Lars von Trier directs in a basic dogme style: natural lighting, no music, naturalistic scenes, plus a new supposedly random automatic method for choosing shots, although each cut seemed too artful for me to really believe they were governed by pure algorithm. But when you add to the traditional dogme aesthetic the mock-documentary aspect of this film, plus toe-curling comedy of social embarrassment, plus the office setting... you can't help concluding that on some level, The Boss of It All is heavily indebted to The Office.
It's well done - I enjoyed all the performances, not only from the main players but also from supporting cast, especially Iben Hjelje and the terribly cute Mia Lyhne who were great as the women in the office, the one voracious (I can't understand why some reviews have mentioned anal sex, by the way: it seemed clear to me that there really was no anal sex in this movie), the other hopelessly romantic. And the style works perfectly for the subject. My beefs would be firstly that von Trier's occasional directorial comments are entirely unnecessary self-indlugence, but more importantly that the film a good half hour too long, with too many slow twists: in essence it's a farce, and it would have worked better if the tradition had been stuck to, with increasing pace of revelations, rather than the strange serial unfoldings and lengthy final scene that we actually get.
It's well worth seeing, though. For me, its social satire is nowhere near as sharp as that in von Trier's earlier Idiots, which was a really brave and original film, but it's a decent farce that only tried my patience slightly. Not bad, then.
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