'Those bonds and solidarity are missing': Fernando León de Aranoa on workplace power dynamics
Starring Javier Bardem, the latest film from Spanish director Fernando León de Aranoa, The Good Boss, picks apart the myth of the benevolent employer
From recent Oscar winners and nominees Parasite, Nomadland, The Florida Project, and Roma, to recent TV hits like Severance and Netflix’s Squid Games, films and television series with workplace depictions and underlying economic issues as driving themes have become increasingly popular.
Writer and Director Fernando León de Aranoa has often explored economic and class issues in his films. A few examples include his 2002 film Mondays in the Sun, also starring Javier Bardem, about a group of unemployed shipyard workers, the 1998 film Barrio about three teens living in a poor neighborhood of Madrid, Spain, and his 2005 film Princesses which features two sex workers as the protagonists.
Spain’s 2022 submission for the Academy Awards Best International Feature category and the most nominated film in the history of the Goya Awards is Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss. The film takes a different approach to recent films with workplace depictions, choosing to focus on the boss, the individual in power over a workplace. The Good Boss’s titular character is named Julio Blanco and played by Javier Bardem. Blanco is the boss of a small manufacturing factory and depicts himself as a good boss, characterizing his relationships with his employees as ‘family.’ Over the course of the film, Julio dispels that familial illusion in his pursuit for profit and prestige by prioritizing his business over the people who keep it running.
The film, which is currently available to rent or buy on streaming services, explores the inherent abuses and veneer of this archetype of a ‘good boss,’ and the attempts of employers to manufacture a narrative around an ideal, caring, beneficial leader overseeing and controlling the labor of workers.
It’s a film he’s wanted to do for years, he explained, after witnessing the state of workers in the wake of the 2008 global economic recession in Spain and the drastic decline of trade union membership. “For the workers in the film, there is no union between them. There is no solidarity, there is no support between them,” said De Aranoa. “For this particular film I was trying to bring different ideas about how this is something that I feel it's happening, how 10 years later, those bonds and solidarity are missing. It’s not as strong as it used to be 20 or 40 years ago and I was trying to tell what happens when you don't have those bonds of solidarity and class and how you’re really in trouble when you don’t have that support.”
Without a union and that solidarity, Blanco’s workers are subjected to the whims of his decisions, and his kindness and generosity is exposed throughout the film as a means to assert control over his workforce, contingent upon compliance.
Employers frequently utilize familial comparisons in depicting their relationships with employees to interfere in their personal lives to an unsettling degree. The film explores common tropes utilized by bosses to establish a sense of camaraderie and complacency in the workplace. This camaraderie is illusory at best and is designed to pressure workers into accepting and adhering to the whims of management for the sake of maximizing profit for those at the top.
“Each character in the film has a different position and a different kind of relationship with Blanco, and for Blanco, he has a different kind of power over each one of them, and depending on what is he looking for, he will use a different approach using this power that he, for sure has over all of them by the end, because he's the owner,” said de Aranoa. “I felt that this idea, this character, was giving me a chance to explore those kinds of dynamics of power and abuse inside the workplace, but at the same time, provided this strong humor I felt was good for the film and the issue I was dealing with.”
Blanco repeatedly oversteps the boundaries into his employees’ personal lives and becomes infuriated whenever he meets resistance. His relationships with employees are predicated on leveraging them for profit and power and extend to leveraging power over local elected officials and media publications.
De Aranoa uses Blanco’s frustrations as a way to inject humor into an otherwise serious issue of examining workplace power dynamics. These issues, he noted, are ones that many people suffer from not just in Spain, but around the world.
“The dynamics are the same. The film, the plot, and what's happening in the film, to me is almost like a microcosm of something which happens in society, not only in the small factory. Having the action in this small town, the owner of the factory can, he can call the media, he can call the owner of the local newspaper asking for a favor, or he can also reach the mayor, the political power in the town. And I think these are how things work on a bigger scale,” explained De Aranoa. “Blanco is the kind of person who's not used to dealing with frustration. He is used to getting whatever he wants since he was a kid. He’s used to that; he’s not used to people saying no to him. He uses violence because of that, he gets very angry because he’s not used to this kind of behavior, people always say ‘yes’ to him.”
The narratives Blanco weave in establishing and perpetuating a good boss persona collapse throughout the film, with Blanco frequently attempting to justify his decisions as ‘what’s best for the company’ and claiming his inheritance of the company is its own responsibility in pontificating over a dinner about the difficulties of management.
With his wife in one of the early scenes in the film, they look disdainfully upon one of Blanco’s workers, Fortuna, who works odd jobs on maintenance at his home, with both of them annoyed by his presence in fixing their pool on Sunday. The worker, a frail old man who has worked at Blanco’s factory for years, is touted in front of an award committee as an exemplary worker, but Blanco’s greed and position of power not only directly results in this worker losing his son’s life and having to continue to work throughout that loss without any contrition from his boss.
He reminisces with one of his employees of a memory he has of the two of them getting in trouble after their fathers were hunting and the worker took the fall for playing with one of their guns. The worker initially accepts Blanco’s framing, only later in the film dispelling it as his father was only there to serve Blanco’s father, who owned the factory before he inherited it, and Blanco set up the worker to take the fall on playing with the guns, forced it on him rather than an act of friendship as Blanco claims it was.
While Blanco is awarded with the prestige of a business award that comes with the facilitation of government subsidies, his misdeeds leave a wake of displaced and discarded longtime workers; an initially proclaimed ‘longtime’ friend who is blackmailed into accepting his firing quietly, Fortuna, the loyal, elderly employee who devotes time outside of work to work for Blanco at his home in addition to working in manufacturing at the plant who lost his son, the fired worker who Blanco instigated a group of kids to assault in attempts to have removed from outside the plant and is imprisoned after defending himself, Blanco’s marketing director who is demoted to pacify Blanco’s young mistress intern and his wife who remains unaware of the affair, having invited the intern to stay with the couple.
The film ends with Blanco unscathed, winning his award, with the audience teased of a final possible moment of introspection from Blanco, who disrupts that anticipation with a deep concern for the possibility that his award isn’t perfectly aligned on his wall, blind and willfully ignorant to the pain and suffering of the exploited and broken employee in the room with him.
According to De Aranoa, depending on the individual viewing the film, the perception of Blanco and his merits as a boss varied widely.
“What I was looking for was to bring this discussion about what a boss is or should be,” concluded De Aranoa. "This is a question to the audience, how far would you go in order to get what you want when you have this power over people? And this is what the film is about, what we do with that kind of power.”