The Boss of It All

And now, my promised review of The Boss of It All, in which Lars von Trier directs a comedy, and keeps reminding you it's a comedy and is therefore supposed to be silly and forgettable.

Havn, the manager of an IT company, has adopted a passive-aggressive management strategy since his company's inception. Although he is the sole owner/manager, whenever he needs to make an unpopular decision, he blames this on "the boss of it all", a company president he claims lives in the US, but who doesn't really exist. When Havn decides to sell his company to some Icelanders, they refuse to negotiate with anyone other than the president, so Havn has to pay an actor to pretend to be him. With hilarious consequences, etc.

I'm a huge fan of Lars von Trier, and I love the whole concept of this comedy. I don't even mind him being a smartarse and making his presence felt during the occasional voiceover to draw attention to the mechanics of the plot, in fact I think that's kind of cool, albeit smug (but I'm a smug git myself anyway). The downside is that The Boss of It All, while fairly entertaining, isn't all that hilarious, but this is probably down to the language barrier really. Imagine watching The Office with subtitles if you don't speak English. All the nuance, the embarrassed pauses, the comic timing - they all get flattened by the clunky blocks of text at the bottom of the screen. And some jokes just don't translate at all. For example, the actor guy thinks that HR refers to Hell's Angels, which is probably a cleverly punning mix-up in Danish, but doesn't make any sense in English.

Having said all that, The Boss of It All is very well observed, and to compare it to is perfectly valid, as like Britain's best loved contemporary sitcom, it portrays to cringe-inducing effect all the worst aspects of management and office culture which most people will relate to. While it is not a Dogma 95 film,* von Trier does retain a lot of the stylistic quirks associated with Dogma 95 (jump cuts, rough sound) which give it the enjoyably rough and ready docu-drama style which for all I know The Office and a whole wave of British comedies picked up from Dogma 95 in the first place. The circle closes.

So, not worth going out of your way to see, but not a bad way to spend a couple of hours either. If you're a von Trier fan, it's a little something to keep you going until his next major work of crazy genre-bending paradigm-shifting film-making hits an arthouse cinema near you.

*Contrary to popular belief, while Lars von Trier was one of the signatories of the Dogma 95 Manifesto, he has only directed ONE Dogma 95 film (The Idiots). The same goes for the other three signatories. They have only directed ONE Dogma 95 film EACH. I'm sick of people writing ignorant rubbish about von Trier's work assuming that all of it subscribes to the tenants of Dogma 95 and then ill-informedly picking holes when it does not. There. Just had to get that off my chest...