The shy entrepreneur did not show himself as the head of the company for many years, but presented himself as an ordinary employee. But there was a need for a real boss figure. To solve the problem, the real head of the company hires an actor to play the boss. Delusional, but Lars von Trier is the standard of film work.
The biggest boss. As a rule, such people do not communicate with ordinary employees, especially if the company is really large, numbering thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of people. You can hang all the dogs on the boss, conditionally speaking, if the employee does not like something ... you can blame the head and everything is like normal. It is in the habit of a person: to spill the negative on someone who is not around and who will not hear you.
The rest of the organization in our film is similar to our world, where God seems to exist, but no one has ever seen Him, and therefore everyone, even Lucifer, can ultimately play His role.
Interesting movie. It’s very interesting, but interesting.
By the way, Sophie Grobel is a very beautiful woman. Why are there so few photos of her on KP? When she was younger, that is, at the time of this film and earlier photos should be posted here.
So we continue the rubric dedicated to the work of perhaps the most famous Danish film director Lars von Trier. Most of his paintings are devoted to existential, difficult for unambiguous understanding topics such as love and religion, sex and relationships with people, the value of being. It is noteworthy that the action of most of his paintings develops somewhere in the UK or in the United States, but do not affect satisfied and well-fed Denmark. Nevertheless, one day Lars von Trier turned to his homeland and touched on a very specific topic of capitalism and its impact on human destinies. We are talking about the intellectual and only in the career of the director of the comedy “The Most Important Boss”.
The owner of a small IT company named Ravn decides to sell his business to an Icelandic entrepreneur, while not ready to do it personally, since he once came up with a legend about a fictitious executive who allegedly lives somewhere in America, from where he managed the company remotely all these years. In order to resolve this delicate issue, he hires the actor-loser Christopher, who over the next few days will play the boss, so that the deal with the Icelander went smoothly and without excesses. However, Christopher gets so used to his role that the further actions of the character he plays begin to go completely against his moral and ethical beliefs.
Perhaps, “The Most Important Boss” is the most Danish film in the director’s career, which is manifested even thanks to the actors involved in it. First of all, we should mention Jens Albinus as Christopher, a typical representative of the creative profession, for whom his work is more than just a game, but also the ability to live the life of another person. The hero’s problem is that the more he tries to prove himself to be a talented actor, the more difficult it is for him to return to reality, where he is just a hired clown. In my opinion, a really strong and responsible game was demonstrated by Sophie Grobel in the role of Kisser, the former wife of Christopher, and now a talented lawyer who knows her ex-husband as peeled, and therefore clearly able to manipulate him and at the same time solve his problems.
To be honest, “The Most Important Boss” is not the best work of Lars von Trier, although the film was warmly received by critics. The problem with the film is that the director is experimenting with a genre that he has never worked with before, and so from the outside it is more like trying to squeeze decent material out of where it can not be. However, the goal of The Most Important Boss is not to make the viewer laugh (Von Trier does not know how to do this), but once again to ruthlessly go through the socio-political theme of the influence of capitalism on simple human destinies. More precisely, we see the fate of several employees of a small IT firm who, like worker bees, plow on the boss, each pursuing their own personal goals. Someone for the sake of promotion, someone because they are used to doing their job qualitatively, someone just to take time. All of them are ordinary people with feelings, emotions, desires that the ruthless corporate machine refuses to take into account, for which money is the most important thing, regardless of paper or electronic equivalent. Of course, this conclusion is difficult to make immediately when viewing, because on the screen we see something absurd. However, this absurdity was a very good experiment in the career of the director.
The plot takes place in a small Danish IT company, which will merge with colleagues from Iceland. The company’s lawyer, Ravn, who is the head of the firm, is wildly afraid to take responsibility for unpopular decisions, and therefore did not come up with anything better than to hire an actor Christopher to play the boss during a meeting with an Icelandic entrepreneur. Christopher offers to prepare for the transaction of employees of the company and suggests Ravna to further develop this performance. However, he immediately faces problems that have long been overdue in the firm, and which Ravn used to ignore. Starting with the molestation of e-mails to female workers, and ending with the suicide of one of his colleagues, Christopher begins to take the game too personally until he realizes that in his hands are the fates of not simple, but insanely kind people who are about to be abandoned. For the hero, it becomes fundamentally important to persuade the Equal to cancel the transaction or at least prevent it in principle.
The result of The Biggest Boss is a very specific movie for many reasons, but above all because of its unorthodoxy and Lars von Trier’s lack of experience in the comedy genre. No, of course, individual moments can cause a smile, but certainly not a bullying laugh. There is a very specific sense of humor among Scandinavians. At the same time, the film is attractive precisely as an experimental attempt to study a complex socio-political topic through the prism of economic relations. Therefore, lovers of intellectual cinema are definitely recommended to watch.
Lars von Trier & #39; The Biggest Boss & #39; I didn’t watch it immediately after the release, but many years later. I am very happy with that.
In 2006, when The Biggest Boss #39 was filmed, Lars von Trier was still considered a super genius and the greatest filmmaker of all time. This opinion was then fiercely supported not only by the international crowd of fans, but also (with rare exceptions - so, von Trier's work was unequivocally negatively assessed by the Russian 'Premier') all the media. It was difficult to resist this pressure.
After the expiration of time, both von Trier and his 'The most important boss' you can look calmly and objectively.
So, calmly and objectively ' The Biggest Boss ' is a very bad movie. And by all standards, from von Trier and ending with genre.
As you know, for Lars von Trier, the art of film production (i.e., directing in the broad sense of the word) was reduced to (in Soviet language) formalistic trickery. That is, the more crazy ideas involved in the shooting - the better.
Here such a crazy idea was to use the computer system Automavision to determine the position of the camera.
To understand the delay in the mental development of this idea (which was clear even before filming), one only needs to remember why a human operator is needed in cinema. And it is needed in order to, guided by human aesthetic feeling, reveal the meaning of the frame, episode, scene for an unnamed character of all films - the viewer.
All films without exception are made for the viewer. Figuratively speaking, the gaze of the camera lens (Dziga Vertov called it 'kinoeyes') is equal to the viewer's gaze.
However, Lars von Trier on the audience has always been ... and in this he was no different, say, from some Hollywood producers. Wherever they go, they eat. Everyone knows that von Trier is a supergenius.
OK, let's say Automavision is a genius system. Of course, any normal viewer (especially those who suffered from the militants shot on the Fontrier’s camera ' trembling camera') will call it a fufl, but we are not talking about the viewer now.
But it's just the camera part! And everything else? Here you either need to score everything else with all sorts of formalism (as in ' Idiots'), or old-fashioned work on the script, directing, selection of actors, etc.
But Lars von Trier believed that one Automavision enough to his ' The most important boss' media and fans called a masterpiece. It was quite real then.
So already purely from the formal side, this tape is bad - an hour and a half of inadequate camera throws.
But let's move on. Lars von Trier was considered a genius of European cinema, however, the whole concept ' The most important boss' (partially - drama and directing, including the selection of actors) this inveterate European hardly dared to take from ' Big Lebowski' (1998) the Coen brothers, acting as a pure epigon.
One of the storylines 'The most important boss' - production related to specific technologies. How to work as a director in such cases? Classic examples - 'Business woman' Nichols and especially ' Wall Street' Stone.
Here, instead, the viewer is showered with frank labuda, not explained even by the logic of the absurd.
Suffice it to say that, although the action is on the IT-firm among programmers, special IT-terms and slang in the dialogues are completely absent.
The law of the comedy genre, known since the time of Chekhov - if there is no action (and in ' The most important boss' it is not), the comedy is through paradoxical disclosure of characters (as in ' Cherry Orchard'). But here the characters are not revealed at all! It is once mentioned that ' they are all crazy' and that's it.
Although it was also 'Flight over the cuckoo's nest' Foreman! But von Trier obviously doesn't care - he's a genius!
It is necessary to pay tribute to the actors - they still tried to reveal their characters somehow, using traditional methods of playing the Scandinavian acting school. But with the traditional von Trier contempt for the characters of his films, these attempts were doomed to failure.
Undoubtedly, all attempts to understand the meaning and motives of many actions of the characters of the tape will be unsuccessful for the viewer. Because, given the quality of the script and the direction, they are unmotivated existentially.
And finally - ' The most important boss' absolutely not funny, even if compared only in the aspect of Danish comedy cinema. And this is Pat and Patachon, 'Shoot first, Freddie!' and of the latter, 'One more' Winterberg.
'The most important boss' is just a dull Danish formalism.
1 in 10
Watch only if there's historical interest in the world's craziest arthouse escapades.
Comedy is not the most successful genre for Trier, however, in “The Most Primary Boss” he did everything he was capable of, preferring Bunuel’s absurdism and illogical actions of the characters to comedy positions. The main feature of the film is the inability of the viewer to immediately engage in the events that are saturated with dialogue, he, like the main character, flounders in vain in what he does not know, trying to navigate in the course of the action. Having invited actors from Idiots as performers, Trier gives them the opposite task - to play unnaturally, illogically, ridiculing corporate ethics along the way.
Being already a hardened misanthrope during the work on the film ("Dogville" and "Manderley" showed this), Trier again criticizes bourgeoisism multiplied by leftism as a property of the mentality of the Scandinavian peoples, making several incorrect curtseys towards the Icelanders (comparing the Icelanders and the Danes, Trier shows the former as uncouths, and the latter as acting hypocrites). At the same time, the director shoots a parable about the relationship between the actor and the director, about their struggle for power, about the unwillingness to give in and the desire to constantly shift the arrows to each other and be in the center of attention.
The paradox of the scenario of “The Most Principal Boss” is in the characters who turn out not to be who they really are: so constantly crying reveals her vision, the bitch for no reason falls under the hero, the main character in the final confuses all the cards with a friend. Such drama is needed by Trier to show the falsity and corruption of human nature, from which it is pointless to expect unselfishness and altruism. Here, each hero is a little crazy, emotional outbursts are unexpected and spontaneous, the absurdity of behavior in the bourgeois world (especially in its heart - corporations) is all-encompassing.
Somewhat disappointing is the mechanistic nature of the camera work programmed by the computer – why it was necessary is not clear, perhaps in order to show the roboticity of the consciousness of the bourgeois, or perhaps for something else. The film has both failed (unfunny) scenes and very successful (for example, episodes of negotiations), which makes it very uneven and ragged, the editing also leaves much to be desired. The abundance of dialogues, their excessive informativeness, which does not allow you to catch all the nuances from the first view, very much interferes with a smooth perception of the picture. However, there is no primitive curvature in it, which suffers from the plastic and facial expressions of most comedians, but in The Most Main Boss there are no comedic actors, all are dramatic, falling into absurd situations, and due to this the film wins.
As for the plot situation of the Chairman, it is quite run in literature (suffice it to recall Averchenko’s “The Joke of the Patron” and Polyakov’s “Goat in Milk”) and cinema (for example, “Hudshaker’s Assistant” by the Coen brothers), so Trier needs it not as a new word in art, but as a way to discover the sore points of Scandinavian bourgeoisism (including nationalism). Despite all its shortcomings, the picture was successful, and although it is not a masterpiece (the comedy genre is too far from the specifics of Trier’s artistic inspiration), it is worth seeing it once at least because of the already mentioned paradoxical dramaturgy and inverted characters.
Comedy? Perhaps, comparing with “Antichrist”, this picture can be driven even under the framework of “family cinema”, but it is unlikely that the question “what comedy can I watch tonight?” you prefer “The Most Important Boss” to funny films by Todd Phillips. Whether the humor is like this in Denmark, or I am too flatheaded, but I did not laugh at any moment in the film, a small smile is my maximum reaction to the twists of the plot.
A year later, in the collection of short films “Everyone has his own cinema”, the old Lars von Trier gives out almost the most memorable and clearly the funniest sketch. By the way, after it, I decided to see what the Danish director is capable of in a somewhat unusual genre for him. The result was disappointing.
The idea of the plot is good and at first I even liked it - the owner of a small company a few years ago invented a fictitious head in order to avoid some problems. Now it’s time to sell your business, but without the CEO, it’s impossible. To make everything go as it should, he hires a not very charismatic actor, whose professional abilities, to put it mildly, do not reach a satisfactory level, and he does not quite skillfully get used to the image of the main boss.
Give this idea to the guys from Hollywood, maybe it would be massive and pleasant to watch the movie, but von Trier made the film devoid of musical accompaniment, scant locations where the action takes place, and rich in close-ups and a change of frame.
The only comic character is Ravn (the owner of the company), who occasionally appears on the screen and gives various instructions to the actor he hired, the rest of the characters look absurd, ridiculous and unconvincing.
The film is monotonous and monotonous. It looks more like a performance shot on film, but the same “Dogville” looks much more convincing and spectacular. The small notes of revelation, morality and philosophy in the final part of the picture do not make it brighter, because you can not instantly believe in a character who did not impress you throughout the action.
In any case, the film does not leave an aftertaste after watching, you do not want to revise it, there is no desire to tell your friends about it. Just write a review, thereby ordering your impressions of the picture and put not very high rating.
5 out of 10
And when they say “outsourcing,” they mean “offshoring.” It's easy.
Comedy from Lars von Trier is a phrase that cuts the ear purely snotty melodrama from Quentin Tarantino. And what turned out on the output, it is difficult to call a comedy, at least in the usual understanding of this genre. The situations in which the characters fall are so uncomfortable that they cause some unnatural laughter. It’s hard to even put into words, you have to watch.
Imagine that you are an actor. You stand in front of a woman to whom your character has written bold letters, but you can only roughly guess what they were about. Next, you will have a ten-minute constructive dialogue with her. Or worse, you sit in a board meeting and tell them about their work, even though you don’t know how IT is deciphered. Scary? Funny? Awkward? But the poor actor Christoph did not even know that his character is called Sven.
I could still write three pages about the morals of the film, but I swear it’s better to look at it and draw conclusions. I will only say that we all have to act tough sometimes, but we need to be able to live with it and build relationships with people, and not blame all the troubles on green men. Against this backdrop, Christoph's way out of the situation deserves a standing ovation.
Trier moved away from Dogma 95, but it was replaced by an equally intricate thing called Automavision - this is when the desired angle is chosen not by the operator, but by a computer of eight options at a predetermined camera position. So the frame periodically gets not what you expect from the context. Not a bad experiment quite in the spirit of this outrageous director.
This is the technocrat, Lars von Trier. Meanwhile, he has Tarkovsky’s Mirror spinning in the cinema, and the nose of the ice cream bear constantly changes color. I wonder what he’ll do next, maybe Spider-Man?
Atypical for the work of Lars von Trier, the tape “The Most Principal Boss” embodies the classic quiproquo technique in which only the viewer knows the true background of what is happening, while the characters act according to false logic that arises in connection with the substitution of the central figure of the narrative. Christopher - a front man, a puffed-up "most important boss", an actor who idolizes the unknown playwright Gambini (whose name resembles a montage of the names of Hamlet and Houdini) - becomes involved in an office play, where he is supposed to play the role of the director of the Firm. Actor Jens Albinus - once the leader of Trier's "Idiots" - embodies the image of a loser and an oddball, who eventually gets used not only to his role as a director, but also to office staff, that is, the audience. Therefore, when it comes time to part with the usual environment, Christopher plays out the moral torment and delays the signing of the crucial documents.
Lars von Trier makes the system of domination and subjugation an object of ridicule, mocks the hierarchical structure of society, forcing a small social group to bow to a non-existent person who, in the end, generates another. Bosses multiply, one shifts responsibility to another, whom to believe is unclear. Christopher appears in the Firm and everyone begins to perceive him as a very serious social subject, enter with him who is verbal, who is sexual communication, punch in the face, in general, recoup fully. But he, according to Trier’s typical construct of the dilemma, is just a fake. This motive, if judged, continues the motif of the emblematic nature of the surrounding world, stated by Trier in Dogville. Only "The Most High Boss" shifts emblematics from things to faces.
The character of Christopher as impromptu scenery in Dogville: a fake, but everyone believes it, and just as the residents of a fictional state town “open” the void, in place of which there should be a door, the Firm employees turn to Christopher as a real boss. If we exclude the particular trust in Trier’s creative nature, prone to deception and play, and do not meditate on the “comedy” generated by this nature, then the entire conceptual value of the film text of “The Most Principal Boss” is limited thereby by quiproquo, the above leitmotif of an externally deceptive social subject and the final stroke of the pen, on which Christopher is driven by the demand for Gambini finally manifested by an outsider.
Just as I still don’t understand why Gogol’s Dead Souls is officially called a poem, I don’t understand why this movie is called a comedy. I am probably a person with a very underdeveloped intellect and a dull sense of humor, since the number of attempts at jokes in this film can be counted on the fingers of one hand and not a single one made me laugh. The film is initially not amusing and of course contains moralizing, but the director prefers to deceive the viewer.
The plot flaunts how you can shove all the problems and negatives on the “negative boss”, but instead of ridiculing such a situation, the director makes up the drama with strained jokes. And all this is flavored with allegories and “high intelligence”, designed to outline the “selected” circle of “smart” viewers from the rest of the “mass”.
The endless twitching of the frames is very annoying, the dull monologues of the characters, especially the verbal diarrhea of an unemployed actor about some Gabriel, I want to reel and reel, the actions of the characters occur generally in a spherical vacuum, where there is no lively city or office. Rather, it shows that the film is detached from reality.
I'm not a fan of the allegorical or "high-intellectual" cinema that this movie wants to appear to be. Everything is learned in comparison, see how skillfully drama and humor are combined in a fairly simple and linear film by Charlie Chaplin “City Lights”, and this “masterpiece” for festivals.
There was an impression that a truly sincere and moral person got into a rotten theater, but not being able to help its actors - just destroys him (although, in fact, this is help).
Lars von Trier very subtly showed the pretense inherent in the office system, where sometimes money overshadows the moral roots of life in society. A true boss tries to be good by putting a sweet veil of lies on the minds of his workers ('friends and family'). The main character, Christopher, virtuoso blends into ' cocktail' of office secrets, company affairs, of which he has no idea, and simply penetrates into a new life.
A very fragile allegory bows before the viewer in the form of a favorite play of the protagonist - a play about a city where there are no pipes, but there is a chimney sweep with soot on the forehead. At first glance, it seems to us that the company is quite prosperous, the presence of an ephemeral chief executive makes the team friendly and caring, because all the problems can be thrown at someone who does not exist in general. The true boss, parasitizes on his reputation as a good person, corresponds on behalf of the chief manager with employees and, in general, considers them “old men” & # 39; whom he is ready to substitute by selling the company. But it should not be him, and ' the most important', actor Christopher, the same chimney sweep in whose city there are no pipes. He is the only one who sees these pipes, who feels ' smrad and soot' in the current situation, understands that he will have ' to save' those who are so pleased with the sweet bed and the appearance of well-being and who sows that very sweet bed on 'field of trusting people'.
An interesting moment was the shot when the protagonist got a fist in the face from one of the workers for allegedly arising from him (as the chief) problems and at this moment one of the employees cried (she seemed to feel unfair in this). But when the truth is revealed, a punch is struck by the true boss ... and the employee no longer cries, but coldly looks at the deceiver and the scoundrel who was hiding under the guise of a good man.
Sentimentality and credulity still prevailed, everyone wanted everything to be good, the workers wanted to be lied to (allowing sin), the boss was comfortable lying, but still the punishment came to everyone. The rights to sell the company were only Christopher, and the buyer, who reminded him of his favorite play, suddenly felt the need to end all this theater.
Some twitchiness of the shooting, various findings in the work of the operator fit well into the overall context of the film. It's worth a look.
Trier for this film decided to try a new feature and do without the operator, because the distance and tricks for the camera was determined by the computer randomly and as a result, half of the action can be closed from the viewer by a monitor, which in this scene is well not needed. Most likely, Trier is lying, and the element of randomness was minimized, because it is not the computer when editing the phrases in the middle? No, of course Trier himself. The first 30 minutes was anger, what nonsense, the next half an hour I delved into the meaning, and the rest of the time I laughed and admired the director and the film. The first few days can be very difficult. Original
Trier for this film decided to try a new feature and do without the operator, because the distance and tricks for the camera was determined by the computer randomly and as a result, half of the action can be closed from the viewer by a monitor, which in this scene is well not needed. Most likely, Trier is lying, and the element of randomness was minimized, because it is not the computer when editing the phrases in the middle? No, of course Trier himself. The first 30 minutes was anger, what nonsense, the next half an hour I delved into the meaning, and the rest of the time I laughed and admired the director and the film. The first few days can be very difficult. Original