You’ve got to hand it to Lars von Trier, you cannot talk about one of his films without discussing each one’s radical style. Forgoing the abstract sets of Dogville and Manderlay, von Trier’s latest is set and shot in a real office and photographed in natural light. But instead of using the handheld camera naturalism that he has used since Breaking the Waves, the director has shot the film with what is called “Automavision”: von Trier will select and frame initial shots, and then a computer will apparently adjust and randomize both the framing (and such things as focal length and zoom level) and the quality of the sound recorded. Combined with the director’s preference for constant, jolting jump cuts even in the middle of dialog sequences (and here finally rationalized because of the presumed need for the editor to cut around shots make unviewable by the Automavision), The Boss of It All is as unnaturally shot as it is naturally set. And that setting is surprising too, at least for von Trier: a banal Danish office for a banal Danish office comedy.

The film begins (after, that is, the first instance of the only camera movement in the movie, namely a crane shot outside the office building operated by Lars as he narrates about how harmless and forgettable his comedy will be) with Kristoffer (Jen Albinus), an out of work actor, being hired by IT company boss Ravn (Peter Gantzler) to pretend to be the head of the company during a merger meeting with an Icelandic firm. Taking his actorly role far too seriously (in the opening narration von Trier aligns Kristoffer’s overly earnest character with artsy-fartsy-ism) and bamboozled by the lack of context given by Ravn, Kristoffer screws up the merger and ends up accidentally meeting the rest of the company’s staff, who all think he is their mysterious, long-absent boss. It turns out Ravn had been stringing the company along for years, using the absent “boss of it all” as both a scapegoat to blame cut-backs, firings, and overtime on, as well as a way to mitigate feel-goody office camaraderie around his gentle, lovable second-in-command leadership. Not only that, but by using email communication, Ravn has created multiple identities for this boss, placating each individual staff member, be it staging a potential romance between one (Mia Lyhne) and the boss, or telling another (Iben Hjejle) that the boss is gay and therefore she should spend more time with Ravn. Kristoffer, it is needless to say, is overwhelmed by having to navigate his character through situations Ravn is clearly not preparing him for, first pretending knowledge and expertise about this very specialized technology firm, then playing to the staff’s eccentric relationship both with their real (secret) boss and their fake (acting) boss of it all, and finally trying to get a grasp on the malicious machinations that Ravn has been up to by using this successful strategy of scapegoating.

In what is probably the film’s most meta-comedic move as well as its most brutal and inevitable skewering of capitalism, the abstraction of sets and props of von Trier’s last two movies has been transposed to the abstraction of corporate life: the location may be real, the lighting natural, but what these people are talking about, what they are doing, is as abstract and undefined as any of the chalk outline gardens and see-through houses of Dogville. Like some of the best post-Seinfeld humor, this is the comedy of awkwardness, where the problem is not the thing itself but the idea of the thing, the embarrassment of the situation, the misunderstanding of the norm. Therefore this is an office comedy where we don’t see anything actually being done, we just see people miscommunicating, talking about one thing but meaning another, discussing a subject whose content alludes them, offering empty excuses, and coming up with bullshit responses. The ghost of the boss is the very definition of this corporate life, an existence that commands without its own existence. That, anyway, is Kristoffer’s experience, as he wades waist-deep into a specialized company whose staff, work, and administration he has no experience with, not to mention Ravn’s more nefarious manipulation of both the staff and the actor for his own ends. And that’s where von Trier’s odd audio-visual experiment comes in, interrupting lines, actorly gestures, breaking continuity, sound levels dropping or echoing, literally cutting people out of the frame, and otherwise continually leaving one jolted inside this resolutely banal setting and its stock set of characters—the awkward, lurching style of the film not only reminds one of the artifice of the comedy (yes, yes, we know it is a film) but is also a further expression of the comedy itself, taken to formal lengths: unsure, unstable, jittery, a bit brash, and much ado about nothing—not only is there no boss, even von Trier himself has “given up” control of the film to a non-entity! And it’s like, all this experimentation for this slight comedy? Well, yes. The disposability and blandness of the setting, the modesty of the film is just as much about the shell-game that a corporate setting is as the Automavision and Ravn’s schemes are. The joke is on the lengths someone will go not only to make a profit (that, apparently, is all too easy) but also to be loved for being the merciless capitalist that it takes to make that profit. Ravn’s machinations look normal from the inside, from the point of view of the employees who do not see the scam and see only the “teddy bear” leader they have (shades of both the US and UK versions of the sitcom The Office, whose best feature is their study of a character who is not only the boss but strenuously needs to be liked outside the corporate context) but is bewildering, obvious, and downright horrible as seen from the outside. Thus the outsider character of Kristoffer who must struggle to integrate, realize the horror of the situation, and then, ironically, of course join in and believe in the ruse. Kristoffer himself has to be a bit of an unsure buffoon (he often wonders out loud about his method, his approach, his character, and all of their relations to his obscure playwright idol, one “Gambini”) so that the movie doesn’t become too easily an indictment of the mystification of corporate capitalism and instead, as is both inevitable and welcome about von Trier’s cinema, becomes meta-thematic as the actor struggles to understand how a boss would think, how he could act this way, how he could do these things, how to control the office without his real authority existing—as the camera itself is uncertain how to properly see the staged action.

If this all sounds a bit academic it is because von Trier’s script never really takes the situation or the comedy to the level of human farce and satire that a show like The Office does. The idea is the best part, and the direction is fine, but the film the film is forgettable (as von Trier knowingly warns) precisely because the idea has precedence over the characters. Even an scheme as wicked as Ravn creating a different, uniquely tailored boss for each office worker is used more as a one-off joke than von Trier pushing Kristoffer and Ravn’s charade to a speed and dexterity of relationships between the office workers to become roaringly funny or clever. The characters, even including that of Kristoffer’s self-doubter and Ravn’s sentimental robber baron, are one-off and mostly pawns in a scenario itself approaching a dangerous amount of abstraction (rare for a von Trier script, it is mostly talk and little doing). But The Boss of It All is slyly too casual and light to be so easily dismissed, a welcome relief from the heavy doses of pretense the director has been on ever after his single Dogma film, The Idiots. The film’s very own disposable banality, thin characters, often insipid interactions, and funny-but-not-that-funny plot seems a further point in the movie’s column of comedic grievances about corporate life. Where are the real people and what are they up to? Enough of this flimflam, these meetings, dialogs, discussions, excuse making, ruses, playacting and whatnot—when are they going to stop acting and start doing, or better yet, living? Exactly.