ONE SERIOUSLY FUNNY MOVIE
Unlikely foreign-language comedy makes an argument for terrible dad jokes
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 Hüller), 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 the 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. They switch from laughing at him to laughing with him, enjoying his strange company either way. Every time I see a great foreign-language film — Argentina’s The Secret in Their Eyes or 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.” (Stupidly, he takes that as a compliment.)
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 Greatest
Love of All at the behest of her dad, a scene that had hardened critics breaking into applause at the world première last year in Cannes. It has to be seen, and heard, to be believed.
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.”) It has important things to say about how one culture can be foisted on another in the name of globalization or efficiency. And it introduces Kukeri, a mythical Bulgarian creature that looks like a wet Wookiee having a bad hair day.
It also crafts a wistful portrayal of a father-daughter friendship. “How are we supposed to hang on to moments?” Winfried asks in a rare instance of being serious that nonetheless matches all his goofy ones. And then: “I’ll get my camera.” That’s one way. This film is another.
Don’t let it get away.