[FILM ESSAY] Toni Erdmann (2016) by Maren Ade

Maren Ade's nearly three hour long bitter-sweet drama about the broken relationship between an eccentric father and a careerist daughter shouldn't work, but it lasts all the way to the stunning finale. It's a dryly humorous but conflicted and emotional trip that takes us from Germany to Romania, and back again. Using both humor and darkness, Ade deals with the superficiality of life in a precise manner.

Ines (Sandra Hüller) is a hard-working management consultant who moved from Germany to Romania to climb the career ladder in an international company in Bucharest. Her task is about outsourcing, which in this case means firing people on the spot, but everything is efficiently hidden under a stream corporate bullshit words. Her father Winfried (Simon Simonischek), a lonely, aging, eccentric and newly retired music teacher, has lost his grip on her several years ago and their relationship is chilly to say the least. When his beloved dog dies and the already dull spark of life fades even more, he decides to try to mend their relationship, whether Ines likes it or not.

Winfried goes on a spontaneous and unannounced holiday to Bucharest, but Ines is far too busy with her career to be fully present during the few occasions she and her father meet. The chilly distance remains a fact, and they say goodbye without being able to connect. However, it takes just a few days before her father shows up again, this time disguised as the life-coach Toni Erdmann. Instead of dealing with the emotions and their relationship, all seemingly insurmountable, he puts on a funny wig and crazy looking fake teeth. She's now more or less forced to spend time with her father's fictional character, while at the same time trying to keep the facade up in a soul-destroying job that forces her and her colleagues to kiss up and kick down. Her fathers quirky return turns her whole life upside down.

The collision between Winfried's almost hippie like, unadorned life, and the polished, superficial and stressful antithesis that is Ines' life, is a stark contrast that results in both emotional and hilarious situations. Winfried becomes a little bit like a mirror for Ines, because it's only when she sees her own life through his eyes that she realizes what it actually looks like. The people in her life have accepted superficiality, impersonal relationships, constant stress and careerism as a given standard, but is that really the only option?

Through this character dynamics Ade deals with the fact that we are all acting our lives; we all present different versions of ourselves depending on what situations we face and what people we meet. At the same time she deals with the fragile and problematic concept of "family" and how the globalized world looks like in the wake of the financial crisis looks like. It's exciting themes, and she handles them in a most subtle way. Without ever preaching, the ideas are nicely and subtly interwoven between the lines and in the perfectly fitting naturalistic aesthetics.

The film asks a few basic questions: What are we doing with our lives? What is the price we pay for careerism? What do we remember of our lives? Is it the work, the trips, the events, or is it the little moments of happiness and laughter and perhaps even the pure nonsense?

Admittedly, I was quite frustrated and irritated with Winfried after two hours of practical jokes and gags. It's like Maren Ade want to wear us out in the same way as Winfried wears his daughter out - a type of congenial storytelling trick that will put us in the shoes of Ines. Ines looks irritated and tired when Toni Erdmann makes his entrance for the umpteenth time - but she never reveals his bluff. He's allowed to actually create a little bit of anarchy with his clumsy and Don Quixote-like revolt, in her otherwise harsh and rigid reality.

"Are you even human?" Winfried asks his daughter when observing her coldly managing her business. When he can't reach her with his awkward love declarations or with his comic props, he's bordering on being cruel.

Where many, less talented screenwriter, squeeze the outline into an information-heavy dialogue, Maren Ade allows the couple's psychological background emerge bit by bit. In their reactions, interactions, glances and in quick exchanges. Sandra Hüller uses her body as a stubborn acrobat to create Ines into a tight piano string that at any moment can burst. Peter Simonischek is quietly provocative in his anti-acting. His disheveled character is always out of phase with the surroundings. It very much tells of a generational gap.

And then suddenly, in the last act, Maren Ade's entertaining relationship drama takes a new turn and moves into an absurdist phase that culminates during a house party at Ines where she (literally) throw the corporate suit off, and emerge in all of her naked and human grand misery.

Toni Erdmann is a very original and terribly funny film with a desperate precipice underneath all the laughter. It doesn't look like much else, but Ade's sharp sense of prestige, hierarchies and the power and comedy of the embarrassing definitely brings to mind Lars von Trier. This is as far from superficially polished Hollywood comedy and conventional father-daughter relationship dramas as you can possibly get.

It's an alert depiction of an urban and modern, hyper-individualist Europe populated by emotionally detached and disconnected people, without necessarily being lecturing, moralizing or overly political. It's also very much a hymn of praise to everyday improvisational theater as a cure for depression. One of the greatest film experiences of 2016, thus far!

                                                                                                                   — SteemSwede