Before we enjoy the benefits of the Spanish Film Festival next week, we can feast on THE GOOD BOSS. If you like your comedy black and sharp, THE GOOD BOSS is for you.
A comedy of compromise creating humour out of hubris and hypocrisy, THE GOOD BOSS has style, charm, smarm, sophistication and comedic acumen sadly missing in so much film fare these days.
Javier Badem is dynamite as Blanco, the charismatic owner of a family-run factory that manufactures scales, who is under pressures of his own making as he covets a local award for business excellence. Everything needs to be perfect and balanced.
Blanco believes he is a father figure to his employees, a facade that facilitates folly with young female interns. He is not shy of shagging shop floor sheilas, shenanigans he sees as an entitlement and even a gift to young girls, but certainly no more than a dalliance, a diversion and distraction. To all intents and purposes he is devoted to his wife, a supportive spouse to her small business venture.
Blanco’s infidelities have gone unfettered forever but the veneer of the perfect company is beginning to crack and crumble as he has to deal with a vexatious fired worker, a depressed supervisor, and an infatuated ambitious intern.
To win the competition, the manipulative “good boss” shamelessly meddles in his employees’ private lives and crosses every line imaginable. The more he tries to strike balance, manipulating the scales in his favour, the more the weight changes to his detriment, equilibrium and poise degenerate into instability and precariousness,
Badem is devastatingly sensational in this role, evoking empathy and sympathy in a character whose actions are selfish masquerading as selfless, a masterclass in charlatan charm, beguiling bullying and pernicious magnetism. Push come to shove chauvinism.
Writer director Fernando Leon Aranoa has crafted an exemplary script and Badem plays it to the hilt, championing a charm offensive that often gets past our defences, eliciting sympathy initially, until the illicit becomes deadly.
