SFF NOTES: Toni Erdmann (2016, Dir. Maren Ade)

I used to run a line on German comedies that went something like German “comedy”. But having pulled it out a few times and actually having slipped comfortably into the self-deprecating Germanic vibe, I’m more than happy to remove those inverted commas.

Or I would, but for the fact that Maren Ade looks to be working them to the fullest in two-hour-and-forty-minute cringer, Toni Erdmann. Here, Ines, a high flying business consultant played with slap-faced sobriety by Sandra Hüller, is the embodiment of the comedy I used to mock: sour, deadpan, more business than business-like. She is set upon by the “comedy” hijinks of her father, played with dad-joke zeal by Peter Simonischek, first as fake-toothed japester Winfried, then as fake-toothed, big-haired, faux team coach Toni Erdmann.

He’s trying to bring some laughter to her life. She’s just trying to keep her life together. And though it may not be apparent at first, Ade proves the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Tapping a similar vein as her neighbour, Ulrich Seidl, Ade tills very dry land to grow her comedy. At first the absurdity of Winfried’s compulsive jokes is a light WTF!?!-esque release from the prating, suited and booted world that makes up Ines’ posting in Bucharest. She accommodates him with pragmatic civility, inviting him along to events while he’s in town for the weekend, and in just one night he manages to ingratiate himself with the work crowd. In fact, he’s deeper in it than Ines herself, whose brusque demeanour (and structural sexism) sees her pushed away from the big boys’ table and into shopping trips. When Winfried sees an in and returns in cognito to fuck with Ines’ life, Ade is able to ramp up both her comment on the perniciousness of her male-dominated world and the emotional disconnect that Ines has effected to succeed in it.

Toni Erdmann’s comedy (indeed, Toni Erdmann’s comedy) is facile but potent. It has a bullshit-cutting quality that repeatedly shows up everyone in Ines’ world (if Toni can succeed there, surely anyone can) at the same time as pressing the imperative of letting loose, whether that means remembering your roots, rocking a Whitney Houston track, or keeping a cheese grater handy. The comedic hen-pecking sets up a push and pull between father and daughter that builds character slowly but surely, and just when the two fronts appear irreconcilable, Ade supplies her extended and triumphant coup d'état.

Part breakdown, part phoenix-like rebirth, whatever Toni Erdmann is, it is exceptionally funny when it lets its freak flag fly. There is a phenomenal sense of release that enlivens the film’s final act. It comes out of nowhere, it spins heads, and yet it caps the relational undercurrent that Ade has so perceptively kept bubbling under the surface. When it cracks, it really cracks. You’ll probably want to throw those inverted commas around much of this film. It is indescribably resonant. It is deeply funny.

It is also funnily deep.

★★★★

Trailer:

Toni Erdmann screened as part of the Sydney Film Festival 2016.

You can check out other films from the festival here.