| Spain, 2021 | Tragicomedy | Mainstream/Author Work | Trailer |
I watched tonight the Spanish candidate for the Best Foreign Picture Award 2022’s Oscars venue. The director here is Fernando León de Aranoa, who is better known for his works dealing with social issues, especially work and class-related ones.
This movie, of course, continues with his particular style, but this time he gives it a peculiar Hollywoodian spectacularity tinct that works really well. Even if what the see has a style and flavour close to the best of American fiction drama, we all known that what we see is as real as life. The Good Boss tells us the story of a whole week in the life of Julio Blanco, a factory director amazingly performed by Javier Bardem. Blanco’s factory is a serious candidate for a national award on enterprise excellence, but still has to undergo a last inspection by a commitee that won’t announce its arrival. The main character, who insists heavily on how his employees are his surrogate family and how their problems are his, starts then submerging in a spiral of chaos and dynamite-tier stress when problems start to arise everywhere and tries to maintain the good image until the judges arrive.
We all know that illegalities and dirty tricks are common in companies. It’s a loud secret. This movie does a fantastic job in portraying any kind of problem that can arise in a moderately important company -such as improcedent firings, sex scandals, abuses, accidents and the like- and how the ultimate responsible -the director- deals with them whilst trying to maintain his composture. What is also remarkable is that all problems ultimatively are his fault, as he and his decisions and whims are the source of them. Definitely, life reacts on how you perceive it and thrive through it, and it throws your spits back at you.
The interpretations are terrific, especially Bardem’s. His defective speech gives naturality to his performance, and I could really believe him as a CEO that believes himself larger than life, with all the Spanish personality peculiarities included. Even the rest of the actors, whilst not being overly known or known at all, convey their roles really well, and I could overall forget that I was watching a movie. The footage is clean and bright -very pleasing to watch-, also full of cleverly inserted symbolic details within the plot, and also in the scene composition and props. Especially remarkable is the usage of scales as a symbol of (pursued) equality, and their tilting happening when something is wrong. The leitmotiv of the figure of Themis (or Justice) with the blindfolded eyes and Heisenberg’s uncertainity principle (even if wrongly defined in this move) also act as powerful leads.
Even if the ending is clear from the beginning, the thrill of seeing the plot unfold is satisfying. This movie also acts as a good reminder of the crookedness and unfairness of society, and it’s like this for everybody despite seeming that the powerful are left unaffected. The award the main character earns leaves him unsatisfied, because it’s tilted too. Makes you think.