This film is so perfect a comedy that the fact of its existence alone is something of a joke. It’s an office comedy written and directed by Lars von Trier, the Danish filmmaker responsible for some of the most soul-crushingly depressing films ever made (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) and partially responsible for the Dogme 95 aesthetic movement.
Von Trier himself is keenly aware of the oddity of a director like himself making a movie like this, one that isn’t far removed from the British version of The Office in terms of its sense of awkward humor, production value and documentary-like verisimilitude.
The trailer tells von Trier’s filmography like a joke, building up to the revelation of this film’s genre as a punchline, and the film opens and is occasionally interrupted by narration from von Trier himself, talking about the audience’s expectations in a comedy.
The set up is a pitch perfect pitch for a sitcom. Ravn (Peter Gantzler) runs a business but is too soft to handle the nasty side of it, like firing people and cutting back fringe benefits. So he’s invented an imaginary company president, “the boss of it all,” who runs the company from overseas, and provides him with a scapegoat to blame for every bad decision.
When he’s about to cut a deal with an severely mustachioed Icelander who demands that he deal directly with the president of the company, Ravn hires out of work stage actor Kristoeffer (Dancer in the Dark‘s Jens Albinus) to play the company’s heretofore non-existent president.
It was only supposed to be for a single meeting, but when things go awry, Kristoeffer finds himself having to fake his way through the work week, playing a character he knows absolutely nothing about, including what his company does, the various ways in which he’s wronged the employees he’s meting for the very first time, and even his own name.
Von Trier slowly ups the stakes in scene after scene as the rules Kristoeffer is forced to operate under are constantly changing the more he learns about the office politics. The situation itself is somewhat nerve-wracking to watch, but the entire film is suffused with an additional layer of nervous energy by von Trier’s peculiar process of filmmaking here.
The Boss of it All is filmed in “Automatvision,” computer-selected camera angles, movements and cuts. The result may be random, but it’s randomness with a purpose, the strange jumps making the movie twitch and race like Kristoeffer’s imagination must when he’s called on to improvise the running of a company.
There’s probably a deeper meaning in all this about the emptiness of corporate culture or the human need to be loved trumping ethics and even the desire to succeed if you care to dig for it, but on the surface, Boss of it All is just a really fun way to spend an hour and a half, and sometimes that’s all the meaning you need.
The Boss of it All screens Friday and Saturday, August 24 and 25, at the Wexner Center for the Arts’ Film/Video theater. It will be preceded by short film Guest of Honor by Miguel Calderon. For more info, click to wexarts.org.