Company Ink

The last time actor Javier Bardem and writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa crossed career paths was for Loving Pablo, a paint-by-numbers biographical drama about Pablo Escobar that was sorely beneath either artists' talents. It was made all the more disappointing when held up as a belated reunion for performer and auteur, doomed to be contrasted with their first collaboration, Mondays in the Sun. That 2002 film, selected by the Real Academia de Cine Español to be Spain's submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards, saw a still-emergent Bardem leading an ensemble cast in a class-conscious drama that followed the experiences of a group of middle-aged former dock workers who find themselves chronically unemployed in the wake of a violent labor action. Now, however, de Aranoa and Bardem come together once again for a project befitting the combination of the former's restrained filmmaking and the latter's magnetic screen presence. Except this time, Bardem assumes a role on the opposite side of the conflict between capital and labor.

We are introduced to Julio Blanco (Bardem), the owner of a factory that manufactures scales, as he stands atop a raised mechanical scaffold giving a speech to his workers, praising them for their productivity and emphasizing the family-oriented nature of a successful business. But the content and imagery of Blanco's speech turns out to be more for the benefit of a local newspaper, who are running a story on the factory because it has been nominated for an award in business excellence. What's more, if this business is a family, then all is not well in the house of Blanco.

The lead that is being buried by the earned press is that Básculas Blancos ("Blancos Scales") has just recently gone through a series of layoffs, with one employee in particular, Jose (Óscar de la Fuente) taking the matter extremely personally, even going so far as to set up a one-man protest on a small plot of public land right outside the factory gates. This alone bodes poorly for the factory's award prospects, with the excellence committee due to inspect Blanco's business in just a week's time. But the internal situation proves just as bad, the factory being increasingly plagued by logistical problems and communications errors that fall on the head of the factory foreman Miralles (Manolo Solo). His attentions are being consumed by problems with his marriage, and suspicions that his wife Aurora (Mara Guil) is having an affair. When he confronts Aurora, Blanco learns that Miralles himself has had an affair with his secretary Inés (Yaël Belicha). To make matters worse, the paternally charismatic but superficial Blanco is to not above dipping his pen in company ink himself, beginning his own affair with an 18-year-old marketing intern named Liliana (Almudena Amor).

The Good Boss is fairly light when it comes to corporate satire. This is surprising in retrospect, because as de Aranoa continues to pull the criss-crossing threads of Blanco and his employees' indiscretions, and as the pretentious bonds of this "family company" continue to fray, he does more than merely gesture at individual "mistakes," as Blanco calls them. His writing takes on an almost disturbingly casual and fleeting apprehension of an especially provincial kind of hierarchy and corruption that is not just a send up of sexual foibles or the shallow investment in empty signifiers like the excellence award. Just as much as Mondays in the Sun some 20 years ago, The Good Boss reflects a social consciousness that is highly critical of endemic class inequality, racism, and sexual politics. In the case of the latter especially, de Aranoa takes the concept of the "family company" or the "corporate family" and pursues it to veritably incestuous ends through Blanco's relationship with Liliana. Moreover, though, de Aranoa mines satire by straddling a very thin line between an almost sympathetic view of his rich patriarchal protagonist, who we at first suspect might just be a shallow and deluded rube, and our apprehension of a much more obliquely sociopathic personality as the tension mounts and Blanco is driven to even more Machiavellian means to get his coveted trophy. The problem is both that, as a black comedy, The Good Boss is never really that funny, whereas, as a drama, de Aranoa's largely non-stylized direction also consistently tempers our sense of emotional gravity. And at the heart of it all, the good and the self-defeating, is Bardem himself, who is so good at his own craft that the performance-within-a-performance - which is to say, Blanco's shallow affect - is almost too charismatic and convincing, drawing in and manipulating the spectator.

de Aranoa wants us to emerge from this spell just as Blanco's employees inevitably reveal the extent to which they don't buy any of this "family" business. But what further qualifies this experience, and what deliberately troubles our deriving any immediate satisfaction from the revelation of Blanco's appropriately "blank" soul, is also de Aranoa's evident misanthropy. This is a class critique in which nobody, from the minor capitalist, to the middle-managers, to the proletariat, comes out looking very good. Blanco the boss is lecherous and delusional, his immediate underlings are themselves pathologically dishonest and cynical, and in the case of his proletariat, such as his handyman Fortuna (Celso Bugalo), their dependence and credulity is such that it renders being abject and pathetic a sin. There's also the matter of how Blanco uses his wealth and influence to bail out Fortuna's son after he's arrested for participating in a racist attack on a group of Moroccan immigrants, the father saying all along how his son is a good boy who's just hanging out with a bad crowd, chalking up a hate crime to another mere "mistake." Even de Aranoa's handling of the relationship between Blanco and Liliana, and Blanco's attempts to untangle the knot of affairs among his company men, at once clearly gestures at the threat of workplace sexual harassment and misconduct, only for Liliana to turn out to be a perfect pupil of Blanco's own delusion and cynicism, working towards a climax that suggests the appropriation of #MeToo by the very individuals who do all the exploiting. It's that subtle, almost imperceptible mean-streak that seems to best explain the film's peculiar sense of lightness.

For what it's worth, though, while The Good Boss might not break any molds, de Aranoa's wicked mind keeps us engaged with the story even if its sparks of tension - whether comedic or dramatic - never really fire up in the way we hope they will. The observational, light quality of it exacts its own strange enjoyment that is much more muted in its morbid sense of humor than a lot of comparable black comedies that sometimes just get too absurd or over-the-top. And if de Aranoa is no stylist, he is an excellent actor's director, getting uniformly good performances out of his ensemble, Bardem anchoring the entire affair with his typical, seeming effortlessness. His performance in particular generates such a problematic sense of ambiguity because he manages to make such an identifiably remote and repulsive figure that we all know - the boss who wants his claws in every part of his employees' lives, the entitled rich guy who imagines he's "self-made" - also so identifiably and peculiarly sympathetic in his pathetic vices, the center of a morally vacuous universe that can't help but imply something just as dark and dispirited within ourselves. If such a "blank" man can be a "Good Boss," well, then what does that say about all of us under him, so easily cowed and corralled into putting up with it all?