The Boss of It All

This film is a roller coaster ride. I have quite a weakness for Lars von Trier and I am unhealthily receptive to his experiments, as evidenced by my five-star ratings for Manderlay and Dogville (which are actually theater plays only pretending to be a film). But this time, my patience ran out. The basic idea is promising, and a very clever and provocative satirical comedy could have been created here, mocking everything from management style and manipulation to communication cowardice, etc. However, the director should not have started playing with high culture and theater theory. It ultimately becomes a typical example of a film where the director and screenwriter have more fun than the audience. If it weren't for the fact that Lars is a cult festival director, the audience would probably have reacted much colder to this joke with a completely unsatisfying outcome. It feels like some of the high ratings are influenced by the reaction of the subjects to the emperor's new clothes. The film is ultimately more of a joke at the expense of the audience than a story made for their entertainment and contemplation. After all, even the framework on which the plot is set is weak. In the real world, all this manipulation of employees would end very quickly with a simple look into the commercial register... They should have worked much more on the script and not been so self-centered. My 2 stars are for the sympathetic stumbling of the main character in the role of a company manager who knows nothing about the company or its employees, and therefore receives both a punch to the face and unwittingly agrees to a marriage proposal from a subordinate. Overall impression: 40%. (10/07/2010)

Lars von Trier’s movies are a bit heavy. You can’t expect anything but originality from him; something that you’ll either like or it will make you mad. The Boss of It All is quite a strange movie where the camera doesn’t move at all, so I learned that everything has been filmed in a quite special fashion, which was confirmed to me by the camera shots. The camera was static, and the individual shots got connected by the way people spoke. The movements between the speeches were often just cut out. An interesting approach, which I must say I didn’t mind all. The important thing here were the conversations, which were great. The Danish-Icelandic relationship was the best, I really enjoyed that. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching how they speak Danish on one hand and on the other translate it into Icelandic, which is as if you were using an interpreter to convey what someone from Prague says to people from Moravia. (24/01/2013)

I couldn't wait to see it. Dogme strikes me as probably the worst possible way to make a comedy. In reality, it looked like I knew a joke had just been made, but it didn't raise even a hint of laughter. The whole thing is completely dead and bland. It's possible that the not-so-good subtitles played a role. The acting ensemble, despite my admiration for them, is in my opinion terribly dull and unable to deliver a joke. As much as I like Trier, I can't see his most-Dogme films. This one ranks alongside The Idiots for me. Again, I was so disgusted by the form that I couldn't get to the content. I'll probably come back to it, but for now it's more than one star for the idea and the opening good joke with the prologue of the director we see in the reflection of the window. (17/05/2010)