'Those bonds and solidarity are missing': Fernando León de Aranoa on workplace power dynamics

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 ...