★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Winfried Conradi is so given to practical jokes that he practically depends on them. When he opens the door of his home in the spa town of Aachen, he regales the postman with an elaborate deception featuring look-alike brothers, prison terms, erotic magazines, and mail bombs, tipping the postman for any distress accrued and to make amends for his own strange excesses. He carries a pair of false teeth...
(4/4)
Director: Maren Ade | Producers: Maren Ade, Jonas Dornbach, Janine Jackowski, Michael Merkt | Writer: Maren Ade | Starring: Peter Simonischek, Sandra Hüller, Ingrid Bisu, Michael Wittenborn, Thomas Loibl, Trystan Pütter, Hadewych Minis, Lucy Russell, Vlad Ivanov, Victoria Cocias | Cinematography: Patrick Orth | Editor: Heike Parplies
Winfried Conradi is so given to practical jokes that he practically depends on them. When he opens the door of his home in the spa town of Aachen, he regales the postman with an elaborate deception featuring look-alike brothers, prison terms, erotic magazines, and mail bombs, tipping the postman for any distress accrued and to make amends for his own strange excesses. He carries a pair of false teeth in his shirt pocket, and occasionally visits his elderly mother. Winfried is briefly given pause when a piano student pops by to explain that he no longer has time for lessons; after performing in zombie makeup at a school recital for a retiring teacher, his beloved dog dies, so Winfried finds himself with enough time and of the right sort of disposition to go and visit his daughter Ines, who works in consulting in Bucharest and rarely checks in with her family.
Winfried and Ines are not estranged, but they’re not used to one another and they display opposing characteristics. He depends on humour as a way to bring out the joy in life, as a means of connection as well as to undercut moments of portentousness – but isn’t the very fact of life, Winfried’s behaviour and demeanour implicitly asks, somehow portentous? Ines puts herself completely into her work, consulting on an outsourcing project in the oil industry. He thinks that she needs to lighten up, but more than that, behind the humour he is a touch disapproving, because he worries for her happiness and because her high-powered career gives cause for reflection. Winfried is talented but somehow also disappointed, and seems neither ambitious nor driven. More than anything though he does want to spend time with his daughter. Ines might love her father but she sees his presence in Bucharest as an unseemly distraction: rightly enough, for Winfried has brought along his alter-ego, the buck-toothed, black perm-wearing ‘life coach’ Toni Erdmann. In the guise of Toni, Winfried begins crashing Ines’ social and business routines.
Toni Erdmann, written and directed by Maren Ade, is a profoundly joyous piece of cinema. It is at once a work of bawdy comedy, clear-eyed realism, sometimes jaw-dropping surrealism, and slow-moving cinematic restraint. It’s difficult to think of a movie that better captures the dynamics of a father-daughter relationship, here portrayed utterly seamlessly by Peter Simonischek as Winfried and Sandra Hüller as Ines: Winfried is so outlandish, so sensitive, and so gregarious in his role as Toni that we cannot help but love him, yet Ines has an inner strength which makes her not only his daughter but his match. Toni Erdmann deals thematically with the vitality of the masquerade, as a tool for self-expression and for shifting reality according to both context and whim, and it offers a keen look at modern societies and modern relationships.
We might think of the films of Ozu and Miyazaki for their generational contrasts and steady evocations of parents and their children. The world of the overworked professional – zealously pursuing career goals but finding one’s personal life all askew – might call to mind everything from the rhythmic send-up of the modern office in Jacques Tati’s Playtime, to the darkly comic vision of office politics and workplace romance in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, to more recent cult films and critical successes like Office Space and Up in the Air. But perhaps there is something about continental Europe at the moment which makes it particularly fertile for this sort of treatment, where freedom of movement and the world’s biggest free trade bloc and the global twenty-four-hour workplace make the wary old continent rush headlong.
Bucharest is a blank canvas for Ines, and for Winfried too at first as he enters into her world, full of high-rise apartments with their nondescript modern furnishings, conference rooms with sterile black plastic chairs, whiteboards, and a couple of water jugs, hotel suites, luxury malls, sleek bars and clubs. It could be any cosmopolitan capital. But gradually Winfried becomes attuned with local customs, not in a way that suggests he is some naif intuitive, somehow in touch with the earth through his sense of humour, but organically as someone with a gentle curiosity for his surrounds. The Bucharest of Ines and big oil consulting slips to make space for the Bucharest of Toni Erdmann, the city in strange symbiosis with his big black perm, as he dupes his way into a small Easter celebration, and dresses as a kukeri to ward off the bad spirits in Ines’ climactic birthday scene.
Toni Erdmann runs for two hours and forty-two minutes; it opens on a front door with a worn bicycle and a couple of wheelie bins; it moves slowly and steadily and follows people walking or lingers on their expressions; it is mostly in German with a smattering of English business-speak; and for all this whatever your language it is a sheer riot, one of the cinema’s greatest expositions of hijinks and fun. The first fifteen minutes alone manage to incorporate absurdist sketch comedy alongside an acute portrayal of middle-class life, a grown-up birthday party hosted by Winfried’s ex-wife which is perfectly amiable but where neither Winfried nor Ines quite fit. They will fit together, through nudity, furry head attire, and false teeth.
Most of the music in Toni Erdmann is diegetic, emanating from the champagne-fuelled nightclubs which Ines and her work colleagues frequent, aimless vaporized dancefloor hits. There are two soaring exceptions. At the Easter celebration to which Toni all but drags Ines, he coerces her into singing Whitney Houston’s ‘The Greatest Love of All’. Supporting her on the piano, she needs no prompting as to the song: presumably it’s something she listened to or which they even played together while she was growing up. This song, confrontational as well as collaborative, is the climax to the film: what follows is a sort of psychic cooldown, a reconciliation which carries some of the logic of a dream, a subversion of the usual nightmare of finding oneself naked in front of one’s colleagues, and a wordless embrace after a chase through a Bucharest park. The end credits then are crashingly euphoric, featuring one of the only plausible uses of ‘Plainsong’ by The Cure.
