El buen patrón
Fernando León de Aranoa (2021)
It’s no great surprise that this sardonic tragicomedy, a major critical and commercial success in Spain, shows its title to be a contradiction in terms. Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem) owns a business manufacturing scales of all shapes and sizes – a family business in more ways than one. Julio, who inherited the company from his father, has no children of his own and is fond of telling his staff that they are his family. He waxes lyrical-philosophical about the factory’s product: making scales, he says, is part and parcel of striving for balance, for justice. Based on the outskirts of an unnamed Spanish town, Blanco Scales has been short-listed by the regional government for a best business award. The committee deciding the winner is about to visit the factory for a crucial tour of inspection. Julio is keen to add to the wall of trophies in his home and ensure that nothing goes wrong until the award is won. Some hope. The Good Boss, which covers a week or so in the protagonist’s life, is also – and also unsurprisingly – a demonstration of Murphy’s Law.
The metaphorical stuff about scales is cant, though the imagery comes in handy for advertising copy. But Julio really does take a personal interest in his employees, in and out of the factory. Sunday morning sees Fortuna (Celso Bugallo), a member of staff senior in age if not status, doing handyman jobs at the boss’s home while Julio and his wife Adela (Sonia Almarcha) breakfast by their swimming pool. Fortuna’s delinquent son Salva has spent a night in the police cells after a fracas. Julio is happy to use his good offices to get Salva (Martín Páez) released; he also arranges a job to keep Salva out of trouble, helping with deliveries, on his motorbike, from Adela’s lingerie shop in the town centre. Miralles (Manolo Solo), the firm’s long-serving production manager, is stressed and making mistakes at work. Julio takes him for dinner to find out what’s wrong. When he learns that Miralles’ wife, Aurora (Mara Guil), is seeing another man, Julio drops in at the supermarket where she works to offer advice. At the start of the film, he conducts a farewell ceremony for the factory’s latest group of marketing interns. As he makes a presentation to one of them (Eva Rubio), she tearfully whispers her love for Julio. He calmly tells her, sotto voce, to control herself. Next day, he’s telling a new crop of interns that he regards them as his daughters. He’s immediately taken with beautiful, leggy Liliana (Almudena Amor). She’s immediately aware of his interest and smiles back flirtatiously.
In the hands of writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa, the film clicks along like a well-oiled machine. As you’d expect, Javier Bardem is charismatic and commanding in the lead; he gets good support from a thoroughly capable cast. An effective score, by Zeltia Montes, moves gradually from ironic jauntiness to something darker. The plotting, though, even allowing that The Good Boss is satirical parable rather than realistic drama, doesn’t satisfy. Julio eventually betrays people, instigates a violent crime and is forced into humiliating rearguard action – all for the sake of the business award, which Blanco Scales duly wins. Yet the plot depends not just on his boat being rocked but on Julio’s being responsible for much of the rocking. He’s wary enough to keep Salva, to Adela’s irritation, at a safe distance from the factory but that’s as far as his caution goes.
From the start, José (Óscar de la Fuente), who has just lost his job at the factory, is a vociferous thorn in the boss’s side. He remonstrates noisily with Julio’s sidekick Rubio (Rafa Castejón), in whose office José turns up, his two young children in tow, to protest his redundancy. This isn’t the best time for Julio to be laying off staff in the first place; instead of offering José a reprieve, he gives him the chance to mount a protest, complete with banners and megaphone, on waste land near the factory. In a bit of zaniness that doesn’t fit with much else in the film, the rhymes and assonances of the banner slogans appeal increasingly to the firm’s security guard, Román (Fernando Albizu). By the time Julio belatedly tries to give him his job back, the aggrieved José has started to enjoy his lone anti-capitalism campaign too much to accept the offer. He has also started to attract press attention.
Julio’s predatory sex drive is evidently so strong that he can’t hold it in check even for a few days, until after the prize is in the bag. In a sequence of scenes between them, Adela tells her husband there’s something she’s been meaning to tell him: she keeps forgetting what it is, then, when she remembers, he’s too busy to listen. It’s only when he returns home after having sex with Liliana in a hotel room that Adela tells Julio what kept slipping her mind: his new intern is the only child of good friends of theirs; she, her boyfriend and her parents will all be coming for dinner the following evening. This explains the knowing look on Liliana’s face as soon as Julio starts eyeing her up but not how it is that he and Adela haven’t seen their friends’ daughter since she was a little girl. By the end of the film, Liliana has accepted Adela’s invitation to stay in the Blancos’ house, a continuing reminder of Julio’s infidelity. Adela is an underwritten character: early on, her unsmiling manner suggests she knows all too well about her husband’s liking for the prettiest girls at the factory. In the later stages, her attitude to this has turned vague.
When Julio first tries to talk Aurora out of her extra-marital affair, she asks if he realises that Miralles is having a fling with Inés (Yael Belicha), Julio’s PA. When he discovers that Aurora’s lover is Khaled (Tarik Rmili), another of his employees, Julio tries again and Aurora slaps his face. When he summons Khaled for a word on the same subject, Julio is told sharply to mind his own business and to stop telling Khaled he’s one of the family – an ethnic impossibility. Julio’s persistent meddling serves its plot function and is reasonably entertaining but I didn’t understand what, in the film’s larger satirical scheme, it was meant to reflect. It comes across as a peculiarity of Julio rather than the usual tendency of an SME boss.
Although The Good Boss aims for a tangled-web effect, it isn’t until the Friday evening that plot threads come together. When Julio gets Salva out of jail, the grateful Fortuna tells his boss, ‘I owe you one’; through Fortuna, Julio now arranges for Salva, and the mates who hang around Adela’s shop with him, to beat up José and destroy his pitch. The hoodlums carry out their instructions but not before José has retaliated, by whacking Salva on the head with a metal bar and fatal results. With more urgent business to deal with, Julio has given his and Adela’s tickets for the ballet – a freebie from the local mayor – to Román and his wife. The ballet is Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. This enables Fernando León de Aranoa to intercut the theatre auditorium, the mayhem involving José and Salva, and sex between Liliana and Khaled, who are suddenly an item, to the accompaniment of ‘Montagues and Capulets’. Julio’s calling in the favour from Fortuna brings to mind Don Corleone and the undertaker Bonasera; at one point, Julio tells someone he’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse – ‘Yeah, like in the movie’. The ground is thus prepared for de Aranoa’s theatrical cross-cutting, which is Coppola-lite. But in this corporate setting the Prokofiev music, to British ears at least, evokes The Apprentice rather than The Godfather.
A much bigger problem is the lack of follow-up to the attack on José’s campaign HQ – save for a memorial ceremony for Salva at the factory, which (incredibly) takes place the morning after the young man’s death. It appears that José, though injured, survives. Aren’t the police – or the media – going to interview him or investigate the crime scene? We watch Julio’s desperate contortions but the implication that, if he’s shameless enough, he can still be his own boss, is bizarre in the circumstances. He owes Miralles one, from boyhood. We’ve wondered if Julio’s concern for his long-time helper’s wellbeing is bound up with nostalgia for the days when, as kids, they went out shooting with their fathers – to be more precise, as Miralles reminds Julio, when Julio’s father went out shooting and Miralles’s father carried his guns. To save his skin if not his honour, Julio puts sentimentality aside. Khaled knows about him and Liliana so Julio fires Miralles and appoints Khaled in his place. In order to keep Liliana quiet, Julio has to make her head of marketing. On the award committee’s eventual visit, Julio gets credit for appointing a young woman and a non-white man to management positions.
In the closing scene, the unfortunate Fortuna is back at Julio’s home, fixing something to the wall on which to hang his latest trophy. The good boss and his mutely wretched, faithful lackey look at the resulting display and into the camera. Julio’s face goes ashen as he contemplates his triumph and what he has done to secure it. Javier Bardem makes this a very striking final shot but its impact isn’t enough to banish the thought that, under The Good Boss‘s smooth surface, defects in the storyline outnumber the skeletons in Julio’s cupboard.
28 July 2022
