Teasing, teasing, teasing, teasing
Teasing day and teasing night
Teasing, teasing, teasing, teasing
Teasing everything in sight
- Lars Von Trier

(Translated from Danish: Drille, drille, drille, drille / Drille dag og drille nat / Drille, drille, drille, drille / Drille hund og drille kat)

It is exemplary to read in the newspaper Information that French media is thrilled by the latest film by Lars Von Trier, dubbed “Direktøren for det hele” or “The boss of it all”. The Danish staff of movie critics have generally been very negative in their reviews. Example:

… [it] does not seem to be made for pleasing the audience, but rather for satisfying the director’s own cravings for joyful play.
-Politiken (Kim Skotte) [source]

Other reviews called it ‘laboured’ and labelled Trier as being a director in an artistic crisis. I thought it was a rather harsh sentence for the movie and Trier. Having not seen it myself (it was removed from the theatres rather quickly here in Denmark), but having had the pleasure of taking a sneak-peak at the manuscript, I thought the movie had potential. Especially because my feelings was that Trier was out to satirise the affectation and a ’spoiled-child’ mindset that sometimes is inherit in a workplace and also in some aspects of the Danish mental attitude. We are one of the safest and richest countries in the World after all and it sometimes shows. More about this later.

Now, according to Information, the French loves it, calling it “a Voltaire-ish Vaudeville”, le Monde praising it as being a “sharp and absurd comedy that primarily is perceived as a critique of the power structure of modern companies”. And in Italy it seems like the movie is having an even bigger success. And I can see why the Danes do not take it (as) lightly (as they should). I see (i.e. read) the movie as a portrait of the interpersonal relations we Danes have. This portrait of a philosophy of ‘being your own boss’ here in Denmark, stems primarily from good living and an anti-authoritarian attitude that has seeped through our culture from years back. This is a broad issue, but forces like certain pedagogic practises and a strong sense of security coupled with the Jante Law are predominant behind this way of thinking and is a minor, but not all unimportant part of the darker, self-indulgent side of Danish culture. This movie to me gives a non-ironic portrait of the Danish individualism, where people do not want to take responsibility because they are too spoiled by not only the factors I listed before but also the huge public sector’s inherit way of handling things for them. Even the so-called ‘Automavision’ project in this movie, where Trier is letting a computer be in charge of camera angles and scene cuts is

the form’s conformity with the content where the instructor is taking a step away from the decisions, exactly like the CEO [in the movie] is running away from his responsibilities
- Aurelien Ferenczi from the TV Magazine ‘Telerama’

Irony is predominant in Danish humour, and when Trier then gives a naked portrait of this culture, mocking it without any well-known and for Danes very omnipresent ironic distance, it looks to me like the critics are reacting to the movie as a result of not being met with expectations. Expectations toward the previous works of Trier (even though they must know by now that he constantly tries to reinvent himself) and expectations toward the handling of such issues, i.e. Trier is tackling them in a direct way instead of an indirect one. They simply do not get the whole picture because the theme perhaps gets too personal thereof. They thereby focus primarily on form, not function or philosophy, and in that way miss the point.