The Boss of it All: Shifting Alliances and Realities

Lars von Trier’s The Boss of It All, opening this weekend at Shattuck Cinemas, is something of a departure for the Danish director. He has returned to Denmark and the Danish language to produce, for the first time, a comedy, and a rather light-hearted comedy at that. No politics, no commentary, no overarching cinematic code of ideals to weigh down his creation—just a clever idea, a witty script and a talented cast.

An unemployed hack actor (Jens Albinus) is hired to impersonate a non-existent corporate boss in order to facilitate the sale of an information technology firm. Trouble is, the actor’s benefactor (Ravn, played by Peter Gantzler) is the true owner and has been masquerading as an employee for 10 years, manipulating his colleagues to his own ends while blaming his unpopular decisions on the never-seen CEO, a faceless entity named Kristoffer who has been running the company by e-mail from the United States.

When the hapless actor is brought in to sign away the company in a private meeting with an Icelandic buyer, a firestorm of nationalistic tensions interrupts the negotiation and spills out into a corridor where the company’s employees catch their first glimpse of the man they believe is “the boss of it all.” And thus begins a convoluted series of interactions in which “Kristoffer” is constantly forced to improvise, trying to match his performance to the various preconceptions of the employees, all of whom think they have developed some sort or relationship with the man via e-mail, though in fact all of those interactions were with puppetmaster Ravn. At times Kristoffer benefits from these situations, and at times he suffers; he finds himself sexually involved with one employee, romantically linked to another, and the source of anxiety and anger for several more.

Ravn starts off allowing Kristoffer a great deal of leeway in shaping his character, but increasingly tries to usurp more and more control. The actor of course rebels as he gains confidence in the role, pompously delving deeper and deeper into his character’s motivation until, with the help of his ex-wife, who coincidentally works as an attorney for the Icelandic buyer, he finally taps into a few crucial insights that will allow him to alter the course of the intra-office melodrama. That said, he doesn’t necessarily glean much insight into himself, and one of the closing scenes features a hilarious episode in which the actor essentially holds up the plot’s resolution for an extended meditation on his character’s motivation, the obvious point of which is merely to draw attention to himself and his self-proclaimed mastery of his craft. 

It all makes for an entertaining film, a clever comedy that uses the familiar construct of mistaken identity to stage a more complicated self-reflexive commentary on film and theater, on acting, directing and filmmaking. 

Von Trier breaks the fourth wall in the first shot by introducing himself and the principal characters, following with a vow to dispense with artsiness for the duration of this “harmless” comedy. Yet this is a particularly artsy method of poking fun at all things artsy, and the director continues to emphasize the artifice of the film at crucial junctures, at one point taking center stage to announce that he has decided to add a new character to the mix just to further complicate the plot. Thus von Trier never lets us forget who is really the boss of it all.

Von Trier uses many of the principles of the stripped-down Dogme school of film that he co-founded, but with a lighter, less didactic approach. He eschews artificial lighting, makeup and scoring, for instance, but employs a unique and decidedly un-Dogme-like technique for photographing the film called Automavision. Von Trier selected each camera setup, but then employed a computer to randomly select various parameters for the shot, tilting the camera, changing the focal length or shifiting the composition. The computer controlled a similar set of parameters for the sound recording. The result is a film that is constantly shifting, as though through a series of jump cuts, giving the impression that the scenes and dialogue were patched together in the editing process. 

But what we’re really seeing is a framing device that has removed the human element and replaced it with computerized randomness. Most viewers won’t notice the technique on a conscious level, conditioned as we’ve become over the years to hand-held cameras, jump cuts and disjointed editing. But thematically it works, as the constantly shifting perspectives mirror the shifting alliances and realities of the characters, adding to the confusion and chaos of a situation over which the principal players—and to some extent the director—have lost control.

The Boss of it All (2007). Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cinematography by Automavision. Starring Jens Albinus, Peter Gantzler, Thor Fridriksson, Benedikt Erlingsson, Iben Hjejle, Henrik Prip, Mia Lyhne, Casper Christensen, Louise Mieritz, Jean-Marc Barr, Anders Hove. 99 minutes. Not rated. In Danish with English subtitles. 

Stumbling After The Third Man

Everyone talks about Harry Lime. He’s one of the most charismatic and cynical of movie villains, a cad who plays the people and police for suckers while justifying his crimes with glib insouciance.

By the time the racketeer finally makes his appearance in Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), everyone in the film has been talking about him for nearly an hour. And audiences and critics have been talking about him ever since.

Neither has there has been any shortage of commentary on Reed’s brilliant direction and pacing; on Graham Greene’s finely crafted original screenplay; on Robert Krasker’s stunning black and white photography that presents a wet, murky portrait of post-war Vienna; on Anton Karas’ zither score and its effortless transitions from the jauntiness of Lime’s theme to suspense to romance to its wistful conclusion; on Orson Welles’ brief but riveting performance as Lime; on the famous scenes in the Vienna sewers, atop the Prater’s Ferris wheel, and in the shadowy nighttime streets; and on the strong performances of Trevor Howard and Alida Valli, as well as a number of supporting actors in sharply etched character parts.

But what often gets overlooked in discussions of The Third Man is its leading man, Joseph Cotten.

Cotten’s portrayal of the naive and blundering Holly Martins isn’t the flashiest role in the film, but it is the most crucial, for it is through his eyes that we see the labyrinthine plot unfold. He plays both the hero and the fool, stumbling about blindly through a foreign city and its web of blackmarket intrigue. He’s a heel, a well-meaning dweeb, a “dumb decoy duck,” as he describes himself in the end, and what a deft delineation of character Cotten achieves.

Martins is a writer of cheap western novels who sees the world in the simplistic black-and-white, good-vs.-evil terms of his fiction. Martins arrives in Vienna to find that his friend Harry Lime is dead, and when a cop (Trevor Howard’s Major Calloway) speaks ill of Lime over drinks, Martins bristles, attempts to punch the major, and then seizes the opportunity to play the hero by investigating the circumstances surrounding Lime’s death in order to clear his friend’s name and expose the corruption of Calloway.

Though he sees himself as a swaggering tough in search of justice, Martins is hardly noble, and he knows it. He moons after his best friend’s girl, aimlessly wanders through the rubble-strewn city, and even becomes responsible for the deaths of two innocent men along the way.

All the while director Reed keeps us just as bewildered as Martins, with off-kilter images, foreign-language dialogue left untranslated, and a breathless pace that keeps us moving from scene to scene before all the implications have set in.

Writer Graham Greene seems to have taken great pleasure in presenting Martins as the Ugly American—not to mention clumsy, naive and potentially dangerous. Greene himself may have been settling a score with this characterization. In an essay in the liner notes of Criterion's new two-disc edition of the film, Philip Kerr posits that Greene based the character on Robert Buckner, a producer and screenwriter responsible for a botched film adaptation of Greene’s novel The Confidential Agent. Buckner was also a writer of cheap western novels, thus Kerr explains the incessant mockery of Martins’ taste, talent and intellect.

Whatever the source, Greene and Reed gleefully point up the folly of Holly at every turn. In the opening scenes, Martins cluelessly walks under a ladder, setting up a string of bad luck that will run throughout the picture; other characters damn his novels with faint praise or are completely unaware of them; and Calloway finally chastises Martins with the blistering put-down, “This isn’t Santa Fe, I’m not a sheriff and you’re not a cowboy.” Even in the final sequence amid the sewer, in a shootout situation that would have presumably been one of the staples of his fiction, Martins is oblivious to the danger of the situation, wandering out into the middle of a tunnel where he could easily be caught in the crossfire. He’s a liability and his naiveté eventually proves costly.

It is in the sewer that Martins finally gets his chance to carry out his delusional fantasy. But when he takes gun in hand and tracks wounded Lime through the damp tunnels, he again botches his chance at heroism by playing not the cowboy but the loyal patsy, short-circuiting the pursuit of justice by taking down his friend in a mercy killing.

His silly adventure culminates in the elegiac sigh of the film’s closing shot, as the disillusioned Martins, having lost his best friend and his self-respect, finally and with finality loses the girl. The somber fadeout leaves us with a pathetic solitary figure on an empty road, showing up the inadequacy of the cowboy’s simplistic mindset when confronted with foreign cultures and a determined criminal underworld—an all-to-relevant theme in these times.

The new Criterion edition is rich in supplemental features that illuminate much of the on- and off-screen intrigue of the film, including all the features from the company’s previous edition: archival footage of the Vienna sewers; an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich; a radio adaptation, starring Cotten; and an episode of “The Adventures of Harry Lime,” a weekly British radio series from 1952 starring Orson Welles as Lime, this time recast as a cosmopolitan confidence man and hero. The set also features several new documentaries on the film and its creation and two commentaries: One, by film scholar Dana Polan, is excellent, examining the inherent polarities in the film (noir vs. romance, comedy vs. drama, etc.) with an emphasis on the thematic and structural tensions in the film; the other, by director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Tony Gilroy, is less informative, as many of Soderbergh’s facts are contradicted by materials elsewhere in the collection, and the casual, off-the-cuff nature of the discussion comes across as amateurish and ill-prepared.

The Third Man (1949). Directed by Carol Reed. Written by Graham Greene. Photographed by Robert Krasker. Starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles. 104 minutes. $39.95. www.criterion.com.

Brand Upon the Brain!

Guy Maddin’s latest film is another avant garde piece, a pseudo-silent film that employs striking imagery, dubbed sound effects, intertitles and spoken narration in the creation of a unique and fascinating experience. Brand Upon the Brain! is a strange film that seems to exist in no particular era or idiom. It is both timeless and out of time, a film and a story that seemingly could have occurred anytime and anyplace, yet in no particular time or place that ever existed.

Maddin uses some of the effects of the silent era, but filters them through memory, through the ravages of time. While films of the silent era were generally of excellent photographic quality, easily on a par with much of today’s imagery, they have been most often seen by succeeding generations only in degraded, shabby prints, with soft images, blurry text, and unseemly jumps where frames have been misplaced or simply disintegrated. Maddin takes this approach to his film, deliberately infusing his images with a shadowy, high-contrast glow and jump cuts that suggest the movie was found in a long-forgotten vault rather than produced in modern times. The effect is that Brand Upon the Brain! harkens back not so much to the golden-era silents of the 1920s but to the German Expressionist films of the late 1910s, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Even the intertitles and chapter headings flash quickly in blurry letters, and repeat themselves as though the negative fell in pieces to the cutting room floor and was hastily stitched back together by an errant hand.

The story starts simply and progresses to absurdity, embracing the melodramatic aesthetic of the German Expressionist classics, yet with a decidedly 21st century attitude. The protagonist, Guy Maddin (played in his youth by Sullivan Brown and in adulthood by Erik Steffen Maahs), returns to his childhood home, an orphanage run by his parents on a remote, fog-shrouded island. He is there to grant his mother’s last wish, that he return to the island and give the lighthouse and orphanage a couple of fresh coats of paint. The walls are dirty and scarred with the troubled memories of his youth, and no amount of paint can cover the pain of those remembrances as they come flooding back in a mad rush. And thus begins a strange tale told in flashback of Maddin and his sister (San Francisco native Maya Lawson) and their mad, mad parents.

The film is not a true silent. There are plenty of sound effects, which grant the proceedings an eerie and evocative atmosphere. The sounds are stylized however, not realistic; they are isolated sounds that suggest the dream-like reveries of memory, in which only the most necessary sounds are supplied while ambient noise recedes and disappears. An excellent score by Jason Staczek brings a strong atmosphere to the film as well, lending it a classical air.

But most effective of all the elements Maddin throws into this eclectic mix may very be the spoken narration provided by Isabella Rossellini, in which the actress sometimes repeats the intertitles but more often complements the onscreen words with fuller description, emphasis and affect. This technique comes from another quadrant of silent film history, from a Japanese tradition in which an actor, known as a benshi, would accompany the film with live narration and dialogue, acting out the roles of each character on the screen and relating the action to the audience.

Taken together, these disparate ingredients form a highly original whole, one that deserves a far greater audience than it is likely to reach.

Brand Upon the Brain! Directed by Guy Maddin. Photographed by Benjamin Kasulke. Edited by John Gurdebeke. Starring Erik Steffen Maahs, Sullivan Brown, Maya Lawson, Gretchen Krich, Katherine E. Scharhon, Andrew Loviska. 96 minutes. Not rated.