#TIFF16 review: Toni Erdmann

A plot summary is futile, but the premise is that Winfried, a lost baby boomer father, wants to draw out distant daughter Ines, a corporate consultant who has never heard the phrase work-life balance. It gets really strange --and stranger and stranger as we gladly follow Ade down the rabbit hole-- when Toni Erdmann takes over, Winfried's bizarre but oddly believable court jester act (Ade has lovingly credited her own father’s jokes as inspiration). The German language has a word for the feeling he provokes: fremdschaemen, to be embarrassed by but also implicated in someone else’s faux pas. Not enough can be made of stage veteran Peter Simonischek’s brilliant acting of a bad actor and the ever-sublime and enigmatic Sandra Hueller, who sticks to her character’s guns while pushing her envelope at the same time.

“I was interested in telling something about family — about the assigned roles everybody plays, about the ritualistic patterns and about the secret wish to escape all that and start from zero,” Ade told THR. And family here is like a bad cold you can’t shake but that is ultimately a healthy challenge to your immune system if you work through it.

Ade’s work is character driven. She teases astounding onscreen naturalness out of the seasoned stage actors she has been working with. She constructs, not construes the story from there, fleshes it all out with carefully crafted dialogue, then casts exhaustively, polishes the final work with fastidious editing. This process took her seven years from start to finish. Her approach to filmmaking is involved and instinctive and playful, influenced by a motley crew from Ingmar Bergman to Andy Kaufman to Harun Farocki (his doc NOTHING VENTURED shines through in the corporate consultancy scenes).

"It's like digging a hole and seeing where you get out," Ade said in the Q&A after the TIFF North American premiere. But she is an engineer, has a precise plan. Radical, uncompromising, single-minded, gutsy, even dogged (like Winfried) as her own writer-producer-director, not desperately eyeing funding or trying to accommodate the demands of TV commissions. Her three features have a delicate, subtle, vulnerable feel, not afraid of discomfort and open-endedness, the characters and their relationships are human, charitable, brutal and real. Ade is a master of perfectly mixed feelings.

Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise by the force of the film's success, but it did not fall out of the sky. As a producer Ade has been responsible over the past years for intriguing European work, like her partner Ulrich Koehler’s SLEEPING SICKNESS, Miguel Gomes’ TABU and Sonja Heiss’ HEDI SCHNEIDER GETS STUCK. Ade, who shot her first shorts as a teenager, has been dropping crumbs over her own previous features of where the journey might take her. What was the boyfriend-girlfriend constellation in the still very much Berlin-School-esque EVERYONE ELSE is the father-daughter relationship in the undefinable TONI ERDMANN, both situated in a conflict zone with no clear directorial allegiances nor winners. The already near-mythical karaoke scene in TONI ERDMANN that earned scene applause in Cannes and in Toronto is an expansion of actor Lars Eidinger (less convincing in PERSONAL SHOPPER) dancing and singing to Julio Iglesias' To All The Girls I've Loved Before in her sophomore film. Ade's characters are trying to figure out who they are or who they want to be in a corset of codified relationships.With TONI ERDMANN, Ade has taken her craft to new heights, delivering a genre-defying stand-alone masterpiece that is not comedy, not drama, not tragedy, perhaps melancomedy.

And that’s not even scratching the surface of TONI ERDMANN's subtle and thoughtful socio-political commentary around East-West divides, capitalist ruthlessness, corporate sexism, generational change, mortality, gender discrimination — all embedded between the lines, around the characters, and along the edges of the camera. Or as Ines challenges her prodding father: "Fun, happiness, life -- you're throwing some big words around here, let's unpack this."

TONI ERDMANN's funny range is huge, from silly pranks to good old sit com, from clowning to farcical facial expressions, from folkloric cosplay to a naked party. Ade adds a pinch of loneliness or frustration, never overshooting the mark - mostly because she takes her sweet time with each scene and each shot and let's her characters and the actors see it through.

You laugh till it hurts, and it hurts till you laugh. When asked by Germann weekly DIE ZEIT why people are laughing when confronted with sad situations, Ade replied: “Because there's truth in it. Humour, on screen and in real life, is valuable in getting rid of things, in overcoming, solving things. The use of humour is always tied to desperation and self-awareness.”

In the end, the awkwardness, the tears and the laugher are in the eye of the audience as they are drawn into the characters' world. Ade affords her viewers (unsettling) identification but never easy sympathy. That this trick works on critics and audiences around the world is a rare, transcendental feat that sets the bar dizzyingly high for her fourth prank.

by @JuttaBrendemuhl

promo image: Sandra Hueller in TONI ERDMANN courtesy Komplizen Film