The Good Boss

(El buen patrón)

Fernando León de Aranoa / Spain / 2021 / 116 min
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  • European Film Awards

    Best Comedy

  • Goya Awards®

    Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Music, Best Editing

  • Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain

    Best Actor, Best New Actress

  • Ariel Awards

    Best Latin-American Film

  • Palm Springs Film Festival

  • Miami International Film Festival

Spanish Film Club
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Synopsis

Spanish with English subtitles

With Javier Bardem, Manolo Solo, Almudena Amor, Óscar de la Fuente

A smash hit in Spain starring Academy Award® winner Javier Bardem, The Good Boss is an acerbic character study and a darkly funny social satire of the workplace.

Blanco, the charismatic owner of a family-run factory, is under pressure as he covets a local award for business excellence. Everything needs to be perfect! But the veneer of the perfect company cracks as Blanco has to deal with a vengeful fired worker, a depressed supervisor, and an infatuated ambitious intern. To win the competition, the manipulative “good boss” shamelessly meddles in his employees’ private lives and crosses every line imaginable, unknowingly starting an explosive chain reaction with wild consequences.

Related Subjects
About the Director
Fernando León de Aranoa is a writer, director, and documentary filmmaker. He has written and directed the full-length features Familia (1996), Barrio (1998), Mondays in the Sun (2002), Princesas (2005), Amador (2010), A Perfect Day (2015), Loving Pablo (2017), and The Good Boss (2021). As a documentarian, his work includes Izbieglize (1995), Caminantes (2001), Buenas noches, Ouma (Invisibles, 2007), El país de los refugiados (2013), and Politics, an Instruction Manual (2016).

His work as a whole has garnered twelve Goya Awards from the Spanish Film Academy, three of them for Best Director, two for Best Screenplay, and one for Best Picture. León de Aranoa has been awarded the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival for Best Picture and the Silver Shell for Best Director, an Ariel from the Mexican Film Academy, two Donatello nominations from the Italian Academy and the Luis Buñuel award for Best Ibero-American Picture.

Press

“With a style reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ trademark cinematic sarcasm, León de Aranoa artfully spins a story of bad behavior trying to pass itself off as good.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter

“Smart and surprising. A scale proves to be an apt and rich metaphor for how to keep a company going in this slyly engaging workplace comedy.” – Kyle Smith, Wall Street Journal

“The star delivers a masterclass in reptilian charm as the unscrupulous head of a provincial firm. Impressively slick!” – Mark Kermode, The Guardian

“Played with an inspired fusion of mundanity and menace by Bardem - his natural earthy charisma tamped down beneath shapeless suiting, wire-rimmed glasses and a lank, frosted swadge of executive hair - he’s curiously riveting, and the best reason this amusing but gazpacho-temperature satire has for being.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

Notes on the Film

“The Good Boss is a portrait of depersonalization and the deterioration of labor relations, a landscape of a time in which outdated concepts such as solidarity, ethics or the common good seem to have been erased from the employment map, only to be replaced by the logic of profit and precariousness.

Blanco (Bardem) is a charismatic character, an advantageous player who shamelessly involves himself in the personal lives of his workers to improve the company’s productivity, crossing all ethical lines, and with no possibility of return. A character we can feel close to, despite his unscrupulous nature. Perhaps a portrait of what we are, or what we fear to become.

The imagery of the scales, a universal metaphor for Justice, frames the whole: Blanco tries at all costs to restore financial balance to his company, even if this means he has to tinker with the dishes.”

– Fernando León de Aranoa, Director

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