The first of three screenings on day three of the festival.
The Good Boss
Dir. Fernando León de Aranoa / Dur. 120 mins
In A Nutshell:- In the running for an award, company boss Blanco espouses the values of ‘Hard Work, Balance, Loyalty’; his actions, however, tell a different story…
The Good:- Javier Bardem is always good value and he is on fine form here as the head of industrial scales company Basculas Blanco. It’s a slow burn of a film but, as it progresses, things begin to spiral out of control for Blanco, partly of his own doing and partly because his interventions make things worse, but in a way that doesn't feel too obvious or cliched. There are some nice moments of comedy between the security guard Roman and the protesting disgruntled employee, Jose, who sets up home outside the factory. The escalation of the relationship between Lilian and Blanco leads to some satisfying and squirmy twists and turns in an unexpected way. It also avoids going the traditional route as it heads to the climax which feels consistent for the character of Blanco’s behaviours throughout the film.
The Bad:- Not really a criticism of the film but more a note on the BFI’s classification of films. It’s pretty hard to try and pigeonhole films into genre groupings so I don’t envy the programmers having to try in order to give some sort of sense of the film you’re going to get. This film was in the “Laugh” strand (“Laugh” and “Cult” being , unsurprisingly, the strands that the majority of my choices come from) and it is , by and large, a comedy but it does open with and contain some quite brutal scenes so I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting.
The Verdict:- Bardem has great fun playing a man who is incapable of seeing how his own dreadful behaviour is at odds with his publicly stated image and largely the cause of his own problems. The measured pacing makes for a slow burn spiral of things going wrong and leads to an ending that eschews the traditional resolution.
No Q&A for this one.
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