Review by Beatrice On 23-Jun-2023
Natural laws do not lead to a complete determination of what happens in space and time: occurrences (within the frequencies determined through connections) are rather left to the play of chance.
Julio Blanco is the head of the eponymous company that produces scales.
He is married without children and considers his employees as his children, inviting them to tell him everything: only in this way can he help them.
The film marks the rhythm of a week after which a commission will decide, among three selected companies, which will receive the much-coveted recognition.
Julio is obsessed with this award, and the other awards he has received over the years are displayed as precious relics in his luxurious villa.
He is also tormented by the presence of a former employee who was fired and now camps outside the company entrance with banners and a megaphone, shouting slogans like “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido” and rhymed insults at his former boss.
No one can intervene legally, despite Blanco’s requests, so he must think of other solutions...
Interns come and go from the company, with apartments paid for by the boss, in a style reminiscent of "olgettine"; known and hidden secrets, promises, and Julio's paternalism, the father figure so "attentive" to their problems, are used to manipulate relationships to his advantage.
His wife is an unpredictable woman: she asks him what he is thinking, and he always replies, “nothing,” while she counters that “it’s impossible to think of nothing” and that she knows “what he thinks when he says nothing.”
An ironic, sarcastic, attentive, and particularly sharp woman.
The game he plays with his employees is the same game she plays with her husband: she reminds him, with perfect timing, of things he skillfully tries to forget, such as inheriting the company from his father, only to bring them up again apparently late but in perfect sync with events.
She is skillfully diabolical, charming, and disenchanted in the face of her husband's lack of ethics, who is so paranoid and obsessed with the balance of the scales his company produces.
The metaphor of the scales, used in the film as a symbol of justice, perfectly fits the project of the feature film; the explicit reference to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle highlights the attention that the script and dialogues pay to the development and meaning of the story.
In life, as in quantum mechanics, we can never be certain of anything; uncertainty is the belief that many of the things around us are unpredictable, beyond our control, or worse, altered by our own actions.
The moment you measure something, you change it, and the balance of a scale can always be compromised.
The film oscillates between the protagonist's paranoid absolutism and ethical relativism, exposing him "naively" to legal and criminal consequences.
A good boss, as the Spanish title suggests, who plays with human pawns on the corporate chessboard with lightness and ferocity, an abnormal control mania, a pathological pervasiveness, and a paranoid simplicity.
A film that organizes a structural crescendo, accompanied by comic and tragic elements, at times dramatic and grotesque, all with overwhelming music like Prokofiev's Dance of the Knights.
In the last 30 minutes, everything happens, and the pace becomes increasingly exciting.
Paraphrasing Marx, here the story opens as a comedy to repeat itself "first as tragedy and then as farce"; the good boss becomes first a paternalist and then an executioner, rigging the scales of justice to find the "balance" of capitalism while the corporate marketing chases the idea of loyalty with the blindfolded goddess.
Bardem’s great performance adds mask after mask to the true face of the protagonist, becoming more grotesque and deformed: a delirium of omnipotence and superiority that is at times magnetic and seductive, mostly hypnotic and embarrassing, losing touch with reality and its natural course despite attempts at contamination.
The cat-and-mouse game recurs cyclically: Blanco with his employees and the hilarious game his wife plays with Julio...
A caustic and fierce game unfolds with unpredictable skill during the 115 minutes masterfully crafted by Aranoa. After "Mondays in the Sun," here the system of the work-world-unemployment is portrayed as a dark-comedy thriller where the employment industry is in the hands of perversion, depersonalization, and the deterioration of human and work relationships.
The commodity/money/commodity formula replaced centuries ago by the money/commodity/money formula with the absolutization of the profit logic, returns the insignificance of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to the (dis)advantage of the worker as a commodity.
Nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film, "El buen patrón" is cinema that entertains, intrigues, overwhelms, unsettles, and makes you think: Fernando Leon de Aranoa is a skilled magician with the camera, a careful and sophisticated storyteller, and an expert surgeon of screenplay and editing.
The final scene is an unforgettable epilogue, cruel and deaf to any voice of conscience, but compliant with revenge, toasting with a solid, dense, harmonious, full, long, persistent Chateau Lafite. Cheers!
It is not possible to determine simultaneously an idea of a woman and the speed at which that idea will change.
23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice