by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
A 99 min.
In a world of giant, board-directed corporations, it is all too often that you never know the person you are working for, and it is even more frequent that the office has an overriding policy of passive aggressivism (which I think they also call “professionalism”). In fact it is exactly these attributes of the modern workplace that has lead to the success of satires such as The Office, first on BBC and now on American television. If you dig the awkward comedy of The Office, The Boss of It All is a film that is right up your cubicle.
This Danish film was brought to international theatres by Lars von Trier, the same writer/director that made the heart-wrenching musical Dancer in the Dark, starring Icelandic singer/songwriter Bjork. The Boss of It All is Trier’s foray into comedy, and this film nails the laughs.
Ravn (Peter Gantzler) runs a moderately successful IT company, but his employees don’t know it. Ravn’s eccentrically passive/aggressive nature leads him to tell his employees that he is, in fact, an associate or partner and that there is a “boss of it all” who currently lives in America. But now that he wants to sell the company, he must produce this mythological boss in order to negotiate the deal with some eccentric Icelandic businessman who refuses to deal with the cowardly Danish Ravn.
So Ravn hires an actor (Jens Albinus) to play the mysterious “boss of it all,” Svend, at the table during the sale of the company. The actor is not able to adequately portray a knowing businessman, so Ravn brings him to the office to spend a week getting into character. Of course, none of the employees know that he is a fake and many have been eagerly waiting to meet him for years. This is because Ravn has been sending all of the primary people in the company emails as Svend. The actor only learns of these emails as he encounters the employees affected by them.
From strange sexual advances that Svend apparently solicited from several of the employees to marriage proposals to bizarre insults, he is walking into a hostile environment. In fact, during his first staff meeting he is punched in the mouth. What follows is a comedy of errors as the actor tries to perfect his craft through improvisation. He is an idiot and he knows it, so he explains the scenario to his ex-wife, the only person he can be honest with, other than Ravn who is enjoying his reprieve from being the secret boss while waiting to sell the company. As it turns out, the actor’s ex-wife is also the Icelandic buyer’s attorney and she is a master of drawing up contracts.
In the course of playing the boss of it all, the actor comes to like many of the people around the office. So when Svend learns that Ravn is going to sell the company and all of those employees will be fired, he takes it upon himself to act as though he really were the boss of it all and this hilarious premise unfolds into a series of hysterical outcomes.
The humor of this film is dry and uncomfortable, but wrought with smart wit and clever subplots that lead to hearty laughs and scenarios that are just too true in any culture.
This film is being brought to the San Marco Theatre by the Friends of the Fest, a year-round extension of the Jacksonville Film Festival that used to be known as Reel People. A foreign film of this caliber would likely never come to Jacksonville if it were not for the good people who program our film festival and the connections that they foster the rest of the year. So if you spend the Film Festival off-season wishing movies like that came through on a regular basis, this is your chance. See this film on September 16th at 1pm in the historic San Marco Theatre.
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EU Critic’s Choice Awards
