The Danish scamp Lars von Trier, director of “Dogville” and inventor of the Dogma style of filmmaking, seems to live for mischief. Latest case in point: his loopy new movie “The Boss of it All.”
The premise of this very funny film is clean and simple: The boss of a small, innovative company, Ravn (Peter Gantzler), has maintained a fiction for 10 years: He’s told the other employees that there is in fact an uber-boss who makes all the unpopular decisions. This man is never seen.
Now Ravn wants to sell the company to a greedy Icelandic businessman (played by the grumpy-looking filmmaker Fridrik Thor Fridriksson), but he needs the “boss of it all” to show up and sign the documents of sale, because the buyer won’t deal with anyone else.
The solution? Hire an actor to play the role for the meeting.
Two things go wrong with Ravn’s plan. First, the deal takes a few days to negotiate, which means having the actor around longer.
Second, the actor, Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), is self-important, unpredictable, and given to moods of profound soul-searching. Well, maybe profound isn’t the right word.
The comic possibilities are many. For one thing, when Kristoffer meets the staff, they naturally blame him for all the bad things that have happened at the company. There’s a lot Ravn didn’t tell him.
Along with the very pungent comedy, von Trier is working a bizarre technical exercise with this movie: It was created in “Automavision,” one of the director’s periodic brainstorms. Cameras placed (sometimes awkwardly) around the room record the scene, and a computer decides which angle to cut to.
It feels as playful as some of von Trier’s previous goofs, although he might be saying something about the way the director, the “boss of it all” in moviedom, could be replaced on the set by a machine.
What really matters is the funny story and the terrific cast. Albinus absolutely nails the rampant vanity of the actor, and Iben Hjejle (who made a single Hollywood movie, “High Fidelity,” before returning to her Danish career) is attractive as one of the company’s most adventurous employees.
Oh, and another actor: that’s Lars von Trier on the camera crane, periodically popping up to remind us we’re watching a movie and that all of this is so much nonsense. Thanks, Lars, just keep making them, please.
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