El buen boss: an irresistible comedy of amorality [critique]

Javier Bardem excels in this film which marks the winning return of the director of Mondays in the Sun to the field of social chronicle and triumphed at the last Goyas.

In June 2022, Javier Bardem once again amazed the editorial staff of First thanks to this Spanish film, The good boss. While it's terrifying again in season 2 of Monsterson Netflix, Arte is broadcasting this scathing comedy this Wednesday evening. Here is our review.

He had moved away with A day like any otherimmersed in the war in Bosnia then Escobar on the Colombian drug trafficker. Fernando León de Aranoa returns here to the world of social chronicling which revealed him 20 years ago with Mondays in the sun. His first collaboration with Javier Bardem who masterfully embodies Juan Blanco, the hero of this fierce comedy. A boss, heir to a scale manufacturing factory, seemingly a perfect blend of all-enveloping paternalism and righteous authority. Too good to be true?

A handful of minutes are enough to understand it. First by screams off-camera. Those of an employee furious at his dismissal who is going to camp in front of the factory to protest. The start of a series of troubles for Blanco, between his foreman who puts the production of scales in danger after the discovery of his wife's infidelity and an irresistible intern (Almudena Amor, already brilliant in Abuela) with whom Blanco sleeps before discovering that she is the daughter of relatives and who will not give in when he drops her like an old sock.

The good boss is constructed like a mousetrap gradually suffocating Blanco and de Aranao excels just as much in the increase in power of this trap as in its deployment and its collateral damage. He knows how to shift a seemingly programmatic story just enough to an epilogue of triumphant amoralism. And brilliantly tells the story of the hidden violence of the corporate world, from which we can only escape by turning our weapons against it. A demonstration of strength and farce.

Trailer:

Javier Bardem: “In No Country for Old Men, I felt like a steamroller”