The Boss of It All

MOVIE #1,093 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 08.03.23 RANKING LARS VON TRIER: #9 LVT does… comedy? For someone so indelibly tied to the various worlds of human pain if not inescapable and bludgeoning nihilism, this might seem like a strange departure. And that’s entirely the idea. As he mentions in one of the narration interludes where von Trier zooms out and speaks directly to the audience in voiceover: The point of comedy — in his mind — is to reveal the comedy. It exists for the sake of existing. The film actually ends with an apology for having made it, as if it so say it’s all been a gigantic waste of time. There’s nothing of substance to be milked from this genre. This is all, naturally, part of the rouse. And while this one takes some time to get its footing and grab hold of said captive audience, it seriously comes together in the end.

It’s such a departure for a director who once killed a donkey on set and has filmed unsimulated sex in more than one production. The workplace comedy? This is seriously uncharted territory. It’s skewering the idea of white collar business in addition to “office life” but there are other layers to this, as well. It’s about the artifice of film and the great lie that is ACTING.

The editing and framing in this is really weird. It’s completely strained and choppy. I know it’s intentional — LVT actually “invented” a process called “Automavision” specifically for The Boss of It All (check out this mini-doc explaining it) — but it’s still off-putting and takes time to get used to. He never used this technique again.

As for the film, the comedy, itself: it’s a genius setup. The joke is one-note on the surface but there’s a lot of fun to be had with this concept:

The owner of an IT company, Ravn, wishes to sell it. But, for years, he has pretended that the real boss lives in America and communicates with the staff only by e-mail. That way, all the unpopular decisions can be attributed to the absentee manager, while all the popular ones to him directly. But now, the prospective buyer insists on meeting the big boss in person. In a panic, the owner hires a failed, over-intellectualizing actor to portray this imaginary boss, and the actor proceeds to improvise all his lines, to the consternation of both the buyer and the company staff, who finally get to meet their ghostly boss.

In addition to inserting his own voice, there are several additional meta elements (one character negatively refers to the Dogma movement at one point). It’s meta in the best ways possible: never making a show of it and never taking itself so seriously. And yet the film still has some serious and fascinating things to say, mostly about the creative process. Just as the cinematic method employed to actually shoot and edit the picture, it ends up being about how actors assert a level of control over the end product that the director can never quite control. It’s about how language and writing can only go so far (“the idea is God”). The idea of language (writing) in legal contracts expands on this theme. The difference between writing for art and for the law is just another stand-in for how the idea mutates given the context.

It all works because LVT is a genius writer (he’s developed so much in this area over the years). Take the small, seemingly insignificant character played by the American actor and longtime von Trier collaborator, Jean-Marc Barr. His entire personality is that he doesn’t quite understand the Danish language. It’s a microcosm for anyone who feels confused about the plot, or — more to the point — the motivations of a film/filmmaker. It also seems to echo the naivety of his Europa character in a way. His face, not understanding what’s going on, in the background of scenes, is delightful...


This ending is perfect. Von Trier manages to fully execute the idea in a way that somehow expands upon and embraces his previous style (and self-hating ethos). I didn’t know what to expect from this outlier (his only narrative film that doesn’t fall into a conceptual trilogy) and so I had no expectations. But I walked away inspired. This might be one of, if not his most underrated film.

ranking lars von trier cont'd
#10 ↩ • ↪ #8

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The Boss of It All (Danish: Direktøren for det hele) is a 2006 experimental comedy film written and directed by Lars von Trier. The film uses a cinematic technique invented by von Trier himself called Automavision, which automatically determines framing by randomly tilting, panning or zooming the camera without being actively operated by the cinematographer. It was released on September 12, 2006.