Image from advertisement for Calvert Reserve Choice Blended Whiskey, printed in Colliers magazine, June 5th, 1948
Sometimes good movies just fall in your lap. I needed something to watch while exercising, so I randomly DVRed a movie off of IFC last week. A Danish comedy called Direktøren for det hele, it had a funny-sounding synopsis, and I thought, "Danish comedy? Sounds like a novelty." I started watching it a couple days later, and I was about an hour into Direktøren for det hele (The Boss of It All, in English) when I said to myself, "Heeeey, wait a minute."
I realized I was halfway through a Lars Von Trier comedy. Von Trier is my favorite Danish director, but I was somehow watching a fairly new movie by him that I'd never heard of. And it was a comedy! Von Trier's recent English-language dramas got mixed press and didn't sound like my kind of thing, so I steered clear. But, in 2006, Von Trier apparently returned to the dark comedy of his excellent early work with The Boss of It All, which somehow never got any kind of press or wide release in the US. If I'd known about the movie, I would have sought it out earlier - Von Trier's The Kingdom was excellent comedy and superior to the stark dramatic work he's become known for.
The Boss of It All is about a Danish software company founded by a lawyer, Ravn, and his friends. Ravn plans to do a big deal with an Icelandic company, but he has a problem - when he set up his company, he invented a fictional CEO that he could hide behind when making tough decisions. This "boss of it all" is needed to pull off the Iceland transaction, so Ravn hires Kristoffer, an actor, to play the part for the big meeting. Three problems arise: 1) the big meeting stretches into a series of meetings over a period of weeks, and 2) Kristoffer introduces himself to the other founders of the company, who have been corresponding with the "boss of it all" by email for years, and 3) it turns out that Kristoffer is a dedicated follower of the avant-garde dramatic style of the playwright Gambini. It's not a terribly original set-up, hearkening back to 60s sitcom plots, but several factors make it more interesting. Von Trier swears he's never seen "The Office", but The Boss of It All makes good use of the show's approach to dry workplace comedy, and the film's big payoff is as good as anything Von Trier's done. The director also obviously knows something about how software companies work.
I'm guessing that Von Trier's fascination with software engineers may have come from the development of Automavision, the innovative camera technology used to shoot The Boss of It All. Automavision uses a computer-controlled camera that the director sets in position at the start of the scene, and then the camera itself decides when and how to pan, focus, and zoom. The purpose of this, I think, is primarily to force the Von Trier and his actors to surrender any idea of control over the viewer's eye once the camera is rolling. This has a distinct effect on the way The Boss of It All looks, but (oddly) the Automavision camera itself seems to do little. Most of the shots in the movie are very static, to the point that I have to wonder if Automavision itself is one of Von Trier's little pranks.
I highly recommend The Boss of It All for people who like Von Trier's early, funnier work (I'm not counting The Idiots in that category, by the way - I have no idea what that movie is supposed to be.) The two main performances by Peter Gantzler and Jens Albinus are excellent, and the movie has a look and feel all its own. The Danes certainly have their own style, but I was surprised to find that I only own one album by a Danish artist. Luckily, that band is the Raveonettes - "Hallucinations" is an excellent song and has a little of a Von Trier feel to it, I think.
"Hallucinations" by the Raveonettes
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