Movies: Direktøren for det hele (Boss of It All)

It's a comedy and a Lars von Trier movie. Yes, such a thing is possible. And very funny.

A bearded, bellied, (teddy)bear-like Dane, Ravn (Peter Gantzler) is the President of a small IT company at which no one knows he is the President. For reasons financial and emotional, he has hidden behind a mysterious, fictitious "boss of it all," who lives in the States and has always been too busy to visit the company in person, although he does occasionally send emails under the name of Svend E. Ravn has decided to sell his company, but his ill-tempered Icelandic buyer, Finnur (Friðrik Þór Friðriksson), refuses to do the deal without meeting the President. Certain that he's discovered a quick fix, Ravn hires Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), a chronically out of work actor with a penchant toward theoretical, minimalist, and avant-garde theatre to play the Boss of It All, a role for which Kristoffer is completely unprepared—not knowing, for example, his character's own name, what the company does, or what his character has done in the past to his employees. Hilarity—which would be a poignant, painful hilarity if not for its absurdity—ensues.

The camerawork is simple; cuts are jagged and jumpy, and manage to interfere to the perfect degree with our disbelief's suspension (less than Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). That interference works the film's postmodern pitch to just the right degree—one character makes a Dogma joke, and von Trier interrupts the narrative flow a few times to comment on the kind of comedy we are seeing. These things are pretentious in a good way, more like a poke in the ribs than a jab in the eye.