The Boss Of It All film review

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THE BOSS OF IT ALL

The latest film by Danish maverick Lars von Trier is an unusually restrained affair by his standards. This is after all the director who gave us the controversial The Idiots and Dogville, and in his new light comedy he appears in the opening scenes to advise us that there will be 'no preaching or swaying of opinion.'

Von Trier remains true to his word, although he does pop up intermittently to comment on the action. The film is set in the anonymous offices of an anonymous IT company whose boss, Ravn (Peter Gantzler) has a problem. He is about to sell the company to some amusingly angry Icelandic businessmen but he is too afraid to break the news to his loyal staff.

Ravn's solution is to hire an actor to pretend to be his superior, the real decision-maker and nominal 'boss of it all'. But problems arise almost immediately as the chosen actor is very much from the method school, who threatens to scupper the deal and interacts awkwardly with the dysfunctional workforce.

The premise does have some potential and is gently amusing in a dry kind of way, without ever being downright hilarious. This may be because it's quite a slim concept which might have been better suited to a short.

In one of his intrusions, von Trier admits that 'this film won't be worth a minute's reflection', but this is of course another one of his little jokes.

Paul Hurley