Anarchic whimsy takes on naked ambition in this funny and poignant depiction of a father and daughter reconnecting.
After suffering a personal bereavement, part-time piano teacher and full-time practical joker Winfried Conradi leaves his provincial German home and travels to Bucharest, to surprise his mangement consultant daughter Ines at work. Ines, in the midst of a time-sensitive presentation for a demanding client, nervously handles her father and his unpredictable sense of humour, but is unprepared when he unveils his grotesque alter ego, the life coach Toni Erdmann, complete with joke teeth and flowing black wig…
Trailing clouds of glory from its acclaimed (if scandalously unrewarded) premiere in Cannes and subsequent festival successes, Maren Ade’s film TONI ERDMANN proves equal to the hype it has generated. This is a rich, absorbing and often very funny work, full of surprises, which rarely drags during its more than two and a half hour length. Its two complex lead roles are rendered with an impressive naturalism and unabashed verve by Sandra Hüller (best known for REQUIEM, 2006) as Ines and the Austrian- born stage actor Peter Simonischek as Winfried. It has many of the virtues of Ade’s admired relationship drama EVERYONE ELSE (2009) — humanity, subtlety, precision and balance — but works on a much more ambitious scale, asking pertinent questions about the generation gap, the mores of modern capitalism and the still-vexed issue of women in the workplace, without ever losing sight of the father-daughter relationship at its heart.
For all her hard-nosed realism, Ines cannot but be affected by his presence…
In essence the film is a battle of wits between father and daughter, greatly aided by Ade’s seamless changes in perspective, from Winfried to Ines and back. Though the former, with his arbitrary appearances and apparent shamelessness, seems to have the upper hand much of the time, Ines is a resourceful woman with a finely honed strategic sense, fully aware of her father’s agenda (even though it’s never really clear what this is). To deflect him, she tries a number of different tactics: siding with him, exposing him to some of her loucher social habits and finally using his play-acting for her own advantage, when she takes him to a meeting with a recalcitrant Romanian colleague and manages to discomfort both of them. Yet for all her hard-nosed realism and impatience with her father’s wishy-washy humanism, she cannot but be affected by his presence, and during a surreal (yet entirely appropriate) rendition of Whitney Houston’s ‘Greatest Love of All’ she is already wavering. In the wonderful set-piece that follows, she suddenly decides to take an already awkward situation — a time-building brunch at her flat — to a whole new level of embarrassment. Although Hüller brilliantly plays the scene so that her behaviour can be read both as a liberation and as a kind of nervous breakdown, the effect is largely comic and includes an extraordinary laugh-out-loud moment of surprise. The culmination of this sequence is, by contrast, unexpectedly moving.
The film gains hugely from the chemistry between its two leads, and in many ways Ines and Winfried are not so different. It is clear from early in the film, when Winfried pops round to his ex-wife’s house to see Ines during one of her brief visits home, that he is something of an outsider, humoured and perhaps even patronised by his hosts and their guests. His arsenal of jokes and disguises, often morbid in character, seems to be a form of defence. Ines, too, is on the outside, barely tolerated and shamelessly taken advantage of by her odious client, and valued only for her ferocious focus and work ethic by her colleagues, one of whom admiringly calls her an ‘ainmal’. Her random-seeming collection of female friends is perhaps a sly suggestion that they are the only women at this professional level in Bucharest’s business world.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0uwi5EPnpA