A Pause To Refresh A Weary Dogmatist

CHARMING, modest and funny are not words usually associated with Lars von Trier, but they are exactly right for his playful new comedy, The Boss of It All. Made in just five weeks, and set mostly in an office building, the film follows a doofus actor hired to masquerade as the owner of a company whose employees have never set eyes on him. Such an engaging film is not what anyone would expect from this Danish director whose international breakthrough came in 1996 with the glorious but emotionally grueling Breaking the Waves and who more recently made two bleak, stylized films set in Depression-era America, Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005).

A scene from “The Boss of It All,” a departure for Mr. von Trier.

This is typical of Mr. von Trier: His work-in-progress, Antichrist, posits a world created by Satan rather than God, and in an interview this month with a Danish newspaper he said he had been treated for depression in a hospital early this year and doesnt know when hell be ready to work again.

Against this cheerless backdrop The Boss of It All (which opened on Wednesday) makes sense. It puts Mr. von Trier in a great tradition of directors who have been freed artistically by making little movies at strategic points in their careers, films that paradoxically often turn out to be better than their overtly ambitious, budget-bloated works.

Francis Ford Coppolas new movie, his first in a decade, is the $5 million independently financed Youth Without Youth. The intellectual and philosophical themes in this World War II-era story, with Tim Roth as a professor grappling with the origins of language, would almost have to make it a smaller work. That sounds like a relief to Mr. Coppola, who has said he had been inspired by his daughter, Sofia, to make personal films after years of dealing with studios to make money on commercial works like The Rainmaker, his 1997 adaptation of the John Grisham novel. (Sony Pictures Classics recently bought Youth Without Youth and plans to release it in the United States late this year.)

Martin Scorsese made the 1985 comedy After Hours as a kind of quick palate cleanser following a long, difficult production on The King of Comedy. The ease and liveliness of After Hours comes through even now, as Griffin Dunne crawls through a New York night during which nothing goes right.

Mr. Scorsese may even have established the pattern — one for the studios, then one for himself — that directors like Steven Soderbergh have followed. Mr. Soderbergh sandwiched two extraordinarily inventive films between Oceans 12 (2004) and Oceans 13 (which opens June 8). The minuscule, digitally shot Bubble is like a fine short story; running all of 73 minutes, it follows the emotional tangle of workers in a spooky Ohio doll factory. The lush, black-and-white homage to 40s movies, The Good German, may have been too stiff to work, but it was an intriguing experiment worth trying.

Mr. von Trier has never made popcorn movies, but he still needed to shake up his career, especially after Dogville and Manderlay. Two parts of a projected trilogy, U.S.A. — Land of Opportunities, they evoked such fierce responses that he was lionized by some for his daring and artistry, and reviled by others as an anti-American fraud.

To me Dogville is a great achievement, resonant and powerful. Nicole Kidman is Grace, who runs from her mob-boss father to the protection of a folksy Colorado town, only to be raped and forced into prostitution. The theatrical style, with walls indicated by chalk marks on the floor of a bare stage, enhances the focus on the characters moral twists and turns. There is no reason to reject this dark vision of American morality and redemption just because it comes from a Dane.

Manderlay, which brings Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) to an Alabama town where slavery still exists in 1933, is an ambitious failure. Where Ms. Kidman glows with inner radiance and delivers lines with the eloquence of an experienced stage actress, Ms. Howard recites speeches stiffly. Americans have a more complicated sense of our racist history than this incendiary film conveys, but Mr. von Trier didnt deserve to be attacked for trying. No wonder he has abandoned the proposed third part of the trilogy, Wasington. (Now we may never know why he dropped that H from Washington.)

After this the lighthearted Boss of It All seems to come out of nowhere. It begins with sly self-reference as we see Mr. von Trier behind the camera, his distant image reflected in the windows of a high-rise office building. He says this is a comedy not worth a moments reflection, with no preaching or swaying of opinion, and asks Why not poke fun at artsy-fartsy culture? These comments sound like some pre-emptive rebuttal for those who find his films heavy going.

Yet The Boss quickly gets past that defensiveness, and simply allows us to be amused by Kristoffer, a self-important bad actor who has been hired by Ravn, the owner of a technology company who has always pretended to be the manager so he can foist off unpopular decisions on his phantom boss. This sounds like a recipe for a French farce, which the film sometimes resembles.

The office is crammed with neurotics, including a woman who screams in horror whenever she starts the copying machine. Because of the real bosss manipulations, the fake finds himself trapped into making a marriage proposal to one employee and being seduced by another.

Despite the opening disclaimer, though, this trifle is also a wily examination of art and control, with Ravn the symbolic director trying to keep Kristoffer the actor from running amok with his own ideas. And artistic control is more than a casual theme for Mr. von Trier, who constantly transforms obstacles into aesthetic choices.

That was the game behind the Dogma 95 filmmakers manifesto, which he helped mastermind, and which forbade such flourishes as artificial lighting. It was the theme of his dazzling Five Obstructions (2003), with the Danish director Jorgen Leth remaking one of his short films several ways, following draconian rules set by Mr. von Trier. (No scene longer than 12 frames is one of them.) I want that feeling of a tortoise on its back, Mr. von Trier tells Mr. Leth in that film, speaking just as much about the challenges he has thrived on to inspire his own creativity.

In making The Boss of It All, Mr. von

Trier played one especially silly trick on himself. He filmed in what he calls Automatavision, positioning the camera then letting a computer choose when to move within a shot. Viewers wont notice; the film merely looks like a fly-on-the-wall documentary without the jittery feel of a handheld camera.

The important obstacle, which his voice breaks in halfway through to comment on, is more telling and productive: to follow the rules of comedy. Ravn plans to sell the company and get rid of his band of neurotics. Can Mr. von

Trier abide by the rules that say a comedy must lead to a happy ending?

You dont need to know how it ends to see that The Boss of It All was a freeing step for him creatively. And for his fans this small, unexpected delight will just have to hold us while were waiting for the Antichrist.

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