Foreign comedy a seriously funny movie
Toni Erdmann makes for strange company
Toni Erdmann may be the unlikeliest comedy you’ll ever see.
Set largely in Bucharest, spoken mostly in German, and close to three hours in length, it tells the story of Ines Conradi (Sandra Huller), a super-serious consultant with a firm that deals in outsourcing and downsizing. So, nothing funny yet. But you haven’t met Winfried. Her father, a semi-retired piano teacher with a crackpot sense of humour and too much time on his hands, decides his daughter is too solemn for her own good. Fortunately, he has a cure for gravitas, in the form of fake teeth, a bad wig and occasional whoopee cushion.
Thus fortified, Winfried (Peter Simonischek) becomes Toni Erdmann — literally a man of the earth — describing himself variously as a businessman, a German ambassador or a “coach.”
That last term is vague enough to mean anything and take him anywhere. He follows Ines to Bucharest, where her team is trying to land an important client, tagging along on business meetings, crashing dinner parties and acting like someone who’s read about polite conversation and decided to give it a try.
Ines is, naturally, mortified, but can’t bring herself to shatter the Erdmann illusion. And her business colleagues aren’t certain how to take him, but no one wants to be so rude as to call him out. Every time I see a great foreign-language film — Argentina’s The Secret in Their Eyes, The French film Man on the Train, Canada’s own Starbuck — I fear for the inevitable English remake. In the case of Toni Erdmann, I can imagine what would be jettisoned to bring the new version down to 100 minutes. Ines would be a consultant in name only, and we would never see her at work.
This would be a shame, because part of writer/director Maren Ade’s genius in crafting this film is creating a fully realized portrait of a modern woman in the workplace, with a sly sideline on work in general. When a male colleague worries about “offending your feminism,” she snaps back: “I’m not a feminist or I wouldn’t tolerate guys like you.”
Ines is a fascinating character. Her gregarious father, even when not in character, cuts a loose and shambolic figure. In contrast, she is tense and curt, and seldom smiles. Her suits seem to pinch her bony figure, as though her wardrobe, maybe even her skin, is a half-size too small. It’s almost natural that at one point she ditches the clothes, greeting guests to a gathering at her apartment in the altogether and declaring it a “nackte partei.”
This revelatory behaviour occurs late in the film, after Toni Erdmann’s comportment has broken through some of her inhibitions. The zenith of this leap forward is when Ines belts out Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All at the behest of her dad, a scene that had hardened critics breaking into applause at the world premiere last year in Cannes. But a film is more than one great moment, however much it may live in that scene’s shadow. Toni Erdmann satirizes the superiority Western Europeans feel over their neighbours. (“I like countries with a middle class,” says the young, blond wife of a CEO. “They relax me.”)