THE BOSS OF IT ALL -
The boss (Gantzler) of a small Danish electronics firm wants to sell the company. He has a problem in that the person who owns the company exists purely in his imagination. Only he knows this, but now he needs "the boss of it all" to sign the papers and make him a small fortune. So he hires an unsuccessful, resting actor (Albinus) to play the boss. The idea is that the unwitting employees never see their 'real' boss, let alone have him sit in on meetings. But add von Trier's dark sense of humour and The Boss of It All succeeds in being an acutely sharp satire on modern office dynamics.
Setting the film up with the premise of an actor as the boss of a company releases von Trier into almost endless satirical computations. Here is a boss who is forced to rely on his employees to tell him who he is and what the company does. He is an actor, pretending to be the man in charge, who knows nothing about the company he works for or the products it makes. A boss who relies on his employees to tell him what's going on, is incompetent, unscrupulous and constantly waiting in the wings for his moment of glory.
Any comparisons with Ricky Gervais' The Office must end there. This is Lars von Trier (a boss of it all himself) and this is relaxed Dogme. The rules are mostly adhered to, taking place during daytime in an office, no soundtrack and no superfluous effects. However, von Trier is not an absent director, making himself very present when he interrupts the drama to speak directly to the audience, albeit shown as a reflection in the office windows behind a camera. This marks a departure for von Trier who has used The Boss of It All to experiment with a new type of filmmaking and free himself from what he now considers old bad habits.
Wanting to spend more time making films and less publicising them abroad, von Trier has decided to limit international showings of his films to festivals and events. Characteristically irritated by the trappings of all that may encourage other filmmakers (money, fame, glamour, celebrity), von Trier's ego is once again concentrated in reactionary control. The Boss of It All introduces his new invention in filmmaking, a system he has copyrighted called Automavision, or automatic randomised camera. The film has no director of photography and von Trier himself takes a step back from the mechanics of directing to let a computer select the frames. The result is a rather stuttering, jump cut effect where shots change practically each time the characters deliver a line, and some are randomly framed. But it adds an edge to the film's otherwise unfussy setting and is an interesting alternative to the highly stylised. It is also a fitting presentation for the absurd, and very funny, situations unfolding on screen.
Von Trier favourite Jens Albinus (In Your Hands, The Idiots) plays the struggling actor, who takes his role as the fake boss too seriously, wanting to know more about his character and motivations, and talking about himself in the third person. Albinus is used to von Trier's way of working now, and approaches the role with suitable baffled egotism. Peter Gantzler spars off him well as the apparently confused but actually very cute manager, who blames all of the company's unpopular decisions on his make-believe uber-boss, allowing himself to appear the company hero.
The Boss of It All may mark a new turn for von Trier and it's certainly probably one of his most accessible and wittiest films. The self-imposed limited exposure seems a crime for such a relevant jab at corporate vanity, which also has so much to say about experimental filmmaking.
