Who's the Boss?

In his latest experiment, Lars von Trier puts the camera in charge.

by Shaun Brady

ONE TRICK PONY: Ravn (Peter Gantzler), right, hires actor Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) to play the bad-guy boss of his company. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

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Director Lars von Trier appears reflected in window glass at the outset of his latest, arguing that "the film won't be worth a moment's reflection." Of course, the Danish provocateur can never be taken at his word, but the lightweight comedy shows little depth, even if it does start out Brechtian and deconstruct from there.

In this case, though, von Trier could be considered a comedic filmmaker only as much as Andy Kaufman could ever have been considered a standup comic; he lulls an audience in using the bare outlines of the accepted form, then pulls the rug out. He's less concerned with making them laugh than in making them react — and if the best he can get is discomfort, well, that's better than indifference. Von Trier is like a kid who thrills at taking apart machines to see how they work, and if they never quite work the same again when he puts them back together, so be it. It's only when he starts dissecting the family kitten that anyone realizes how far along he's gotten.

The Boss of It All is Kristoffer (Jens Albinus), a down-on-his-luck actor goaded by his supposed friend Ravn (Peter Gantzler), the owner of a Danish IT firm who's never had the guts to tell his employees that he's their actual employer. Instead, he's invented the titular Boss, an absent ogre who communicates with his underlings only through e-mail, and not only plays the bad guy but, as becomes clear as Kristoffer's role plays out, has said whatever Ravn has needed him to say to keep his company confrontation-free. Now, Ravn needs the Boss of It All to actually appear, as he schemes to sell the company to an Icelandic businessman and screw his loyal employees out of their share.

The film could be read as a parody of the director's famously hostile relationship with actors, as the maddeningly passive-aggressive — hell, downright passive-hostile — Ravn continually refuses to give Kristoffer the slightest advantage, remaining mum on any information about the character he's created. As it turns out, the Boss has become all things to all people, as the bewildered actor learns by saying as little as possible and letting the employees vent in his direction, whether that leads to a punch in the face or a blowjob under his desk. Besides that, the script is laden with in-jokes ("Life is a Dogme film — the words are hard to hear but still important").

But this is also von Trier's latest formal experiment, a process called Automavision that hands the framing of shots over to a computerized system. After the director himself sets an initial position for the camera, all further decisions about movement — tilting, panning, zooming — are left to the mechanical mind. The result is a jump-mad multitude of cuts, one after nearly every line of dialogue, and bizarre framing that often finds empty space or some inanimate object occupying the center of the frame while the actors are shoved almost entirely offscreen.

The process never lets the audience relax, constantly having to search the screen (there's already at least one essay online by a perceptual psychologist examining the phenomenon) and adjust to the complete dearth of traditional continuity editing in a film whose director has professed it a simple trifle. If Breaking the Waves made viewers seasick with its unmoored camera, then The Boss of It All could inspire seizures.

But take away all of the dogmatic pronouncements and von Trier is a filmmaker akin to Alfred Hitchcock in his tireless need to explore the technological possibilities of storytelling in cinema. (There's also a parallel there in unhealthy relations with leading ladies, but we'll set that aside for the time being.) No mere gimmick, the Automavision concept mirrors the central concerns of von Trier's script: the idea of relinquishing control but maintaining power, the unpredictability of a creative collaborator (whether man or machine) within an established structure.

Of course, relinquishing any control over the formal aspects of one's own film is enough to send auteurist diehards into apoplectic fits. Regardless, whatever deviations are made by the computer's control of what the viewer is seeing from moment to moment, the ultimate end is wholly in line with von Trier's intentions. Not comedy — there is precious little to laugh at here — but if there is such a thing as "screwball discomfort," then The Boss of It All is the exemplar of the form. As Kristoffer discovers as he sinks deeper and deeper into Ravn's machinations, it doesn't really matter who's given nominal control, whether an actor or a computer. There's never any doubt as to who's calling the shots.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

THE BOSS OF IT ALL

Directed by Lars von Trier
An IFC FirstTake release