The Boss of It All

Lars von Trier, the Danish enfant terrible behind Dogville, Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves, may disappoint his followers with The Boss of It All, not just because it’s a comedy—hardly the director’s generic forte—but because it’s so slim and inconsequential. Ever the enthusiast of technical obstructions, von Trier shot the film on DV using Automavision, a program that assembles much of the sound recording and shots without human intervention. The script, as well, is elementary and episodic: IT company president Ravn (Peter Gantzler) hires a pretentious actor (Jens Albinus) to play “the boss of it all,” a figure Ravn has invented as a means of deflecting resentment toward himself and, as it turns out, to sublimate his own wanton sadism and greed. Unsurprisingly (perhaps unavoidably), the film’s bland approach is reminiscent of The Office—i.e., a vérité aesthetic studded with bursts of cruelty and absurdism—and thus the small screen. Von Trier even intrudes a few times as meta-narrator, reminding us not to expect too much, as if we were in his living room watching something he completed at a weekend workshop. Still, The Boss of It All is smart: its use of a proxy figure as a means of critiquing people’s dependence on hierarchies evokes Jean Genet’s The Balcony. Indeed, like that play and von Trier’s finest work, the most significant laughs here become appropriately—and, in their own ways, momentously—curdled. WAIT FOR THE DVD

The Boss of It All is now playing at the Royal (608 College St.).