Critics reviews

The question of seeing/not seeing, recognising or not, posturing, presenting the fake to uncover the truth, is at the core of Maren Ade's 162 minute exhilarating comedy, Toni Erdmann. As much as a film between father and daughter, this is a film about the travails and joy of performance and the power of cinema – seen from the point of view of the daughter.

When asked to reduce Toni Erdmann to its essential outline, the German actor Sandra Hüller, who plays Ines, described it as: "a father visits his daughter at her workplace". But part of the tremendous appeal of Toni Erdmann is its resistance to such plot condensation. Instead, the complex relationship between Ines and her father Winfried unfurls slowly across 162 minutes of sprawling narrative that took director Maren Ade two years and two pregnancies to write.

Make no bones about it, on first viewing, Toni Erdmann is as strange, delightful and dementedly funny as the hype has it. But repeat watching reveals a film that plays first as comedy, then as tragedy.

There is an extraordinary level of attentiveness and restraint to Ade's regard here. On the one hand, this is a matter of camerawork and editing that always respect the evolving moment. On the other, it's a matter of a screenplay that refuses to take even standard shortcuts to hit its beats.

What follows is a crackling series of extended vignettes that thrive on revealing contradiction, skewering everything from corporate greed to global outsourcing. Conversations about trivial things are merely negotiations of power in disguise. Watching Ines in her natural habitat, Winfried struggles to reconcile the compromises of character she makes both in her personal and professional life.

Just as Winfried gleefully eschews accepted codes of behavior, Ade similarly throws the rulebook of conventional storytelling out the window. Coming in at just under three hours, Toni Erdmann takes the time it needs—no less, no more—to thoroughly unpack the nuances of this particular (and unceasingly peculiar) father-daughter relationship.

As corporate-climbing daughter and clownish father, Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek are deeply in tune with one another, fiercely committed to director Maren Ade's free-flowing, unorthodox scene construction, and brilliant in fleshing out their respective character quirks (so good, in fact, that they disguise the fact that precious few supporting players have comparable dimensionality).

It is the comic genius of the film that our sympathies are constantly tested, and twisted, in scenes that are by turns hilarious, excruciating, terrifying, and finally, deeply moving. The father is Boudu redux, a cataclysmic force of nature unleashed upon the soulless, weightless world of global capitalism. At last, the two desperate souls converge, and nature—love, trees, soil—proves weightier than the tallest concrete and glass skyscraper.

That Maren Ade's sprawling, meticulously messy comedy of manners manages to make us care deeply about characters who are essentially archetypes is key to its unusual charm, but more importantly, it puts them at the center of a non-moralizing morality play about economic global realities that comes by its laughs honestly and unpredictably.

The brilliance of Maren Ade‘s screenplay lies in its eventual revelation that Ines is just as full of surprises as her prankster father, Winfried. Not the song, not the party, necessarily, but more the complexity of her unhappiness and the tiny acts of revenge she takes on herself for giving in, bit by bit and on a variety of fronts, to the indignities she sees as the price of the ticket she's bought.

Ok, I admit, the creative potential of ultra-realist narrative cinema hasn't been exhausted completely, yet. Ade puts performance (the instantiation of pure unreality within a "realist" story) front and centre: a breakthrough, that provokes interrogation about the relationship between cinema and reality; and it's intensely pleasurable at the same time.

I found this appealing and funny and major not only for the father-daughter stuff but also for Ade's really dead-on portrayal of gender dynamics in multi-national corporate horror settings.