Toni Erd­mann – first look review

Pon­der­ing what to write about this phe­nom­e­nal film, I thought it might be worth look­ing at exact­ly what is meant by the term ​‘bit­ter­sweet’, as it often, if not exclu­sive­ly, crops up in crit­i­cal prose. It’s a bet-hedg­ing word, often used when it’s too tax­ing to pin­point the exact tenor of a film, or its over­all tone. There’s some hap­py, there’s some sad, but the movie sits com­fort­ably at a mid-point between the two, so let’s say no more about it.

Using a term like ​‘bit­ter­sweet’ in tan­dem with a work like Toni Erd­mann would be at best lazy and at worst down­right insult­ing. Ger­man direc­tor Maren Ade reveals her­self as some­one with pro­found insight into the arcane specifics of human frailty, and what she’s doing here is far too com­plex to be encap­su­lat­ed with a lone descrip­tor. At times it feels like this is the work of a cel­e­brat­ed psy­chol­o­gist or behav­iour­al sci­en­tist more than a film­mak­er, so nour­ish­ing are her wit­ty spec­u­la­tions on how peo­ple are able to exist togeth­er in the world. She is not some­one who heed­less­ly tack­les The Big Ques­tions head on, but she instead probes for the small pres­sure points and works, works, works at them.

You can imag­ine some­one like Judd Apa­tow watch­ing this movie and think­ing, ​‘I’ve wast­ed my life.’ It con­cerns a dyed-in-the-wool prankster named Win­fried (Peter Simonis­chek) who pays the bills by teach­ing piano. He lives alone, cares for his frail moth­er and owns a hound on its last legs. Even in scenes that seem intend­ed as basic expo­si­tion, Ade nev­er uses Winfried’s gloomy domes­tic sit­u­a­tion as a short­hand to impose inner feel­ings on the char­ac­ter. Just because he lives like this doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly make him sad. In fact, the real­i­ty is the oppo­site – he’s a man seem­ing­ly immune to the rav­ages of depres­sion and lone­li­ness, a mis­chie­vous grin being his default countenance.

Ade’s pre­vi­ous film was called Every­one Else, and right­ly earned com­par­isons to Rober­to Rossellini’s Jour­ney to Italy for its depic­tion of a rela­tion­ship that always seems to be in the throes of decline. You might say that Toni Erd­mann plays a sim­i­lar hand, exchang­ing the twen­tysome­thing male/​female pro­tag­o­nists of that film for a father and his estranged, high rolling daugh­ter, Ines, played by San­dra Hüller. Ade’s mas­ter­stroke is telling a sto­ry in which every action and event sub­tly allude to a moment out­side of the film’s time­line. Moti­va­tion is couched in hard expe­ri­ence. Every­thing we see in this film tells us some­thing important.

So the focus is small and the scope is gigan­tic. Ines is based in Bucharest and has appar­ent­ly out­grown the fuzzy shack­les of her relent­less­ly chip­per father. By day she facil­i­tates cor­po­rate down­siz­ing and her life – pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al – is ded­i­cat­ed to amass­ing pow­er and sign­ing off the big deals. He vis­its her and wants to know if his daugh­ter still exists inside this shell he no longer recog­nis­es. Yes, it sounds like a sap­py ​’90s roman­tic com­e­dy about growth and under­stand­ing and remem­ber­ing where you came from. And what’s so extra­or­di­nary is that it absolute­ly and unabashed­ly is that, but it’s so much more as well. Ade clear­ly has a deep fond­ness for these wacky, high con­cept Amer­i­can pic­tures – she dares to make one, albeit with a real human pulse.

The title refers to a Mrs Doubt­fire-like alter-ego cre­at­ed by Win­fried as a way for him to briefly embed him­self with­in his daughter’s stress­ful and, from his van­tage, dis­mal life. With his com­e­dy fright wig, gar­ish buck teeth and quite the most won­der­ful bar­gain base­ment nylon sports jack­et, he just fol­lows her around and talks to her. She hates it and wants him to just go away. But grad­u­al­ly he wears her down and she becomes com­plic­it in his fan­ci­ful cha­rade. They regress back to her child­hood, hand in hand, but it takes a lot to con­vince her to join him. It’s hard to think of a more thought­ful, inci­sive, obser­vant and elo­quent depic­tion of a father-daugh­ter rela­tion­ship out­side of Ozu.

As men­tioned, you’d like­ly clas­si­fy the film as a com­e­dy due to the num­ber of expert­ly chore­o­graphed com­ic set pieces, which are duly hilar­i­ous. Like, real­ly hilar­i­ous. But Toni Erd­mann is, even­tu­al­ly, an unbear­ably melan­cholic expe­ri­ence, to the point where the film’s fun­ni­est sequence also man­ages to be its sad­dest. In time, the irre­press­ible Toni comes to rep­re­sent some­thing more than a per­son, but a block of time that a pair of peo­ple spent together.

It ques­tions whether we can ever com­pre­hend that we have been indeli­bly shaped by our par­ents, even if we’ve tak­en steps to evolve and sev­er ties with past foibles. It’s also about the mag­ic of movies them­selves, about how role-play and act­ing can be used as tools to explore unchar­tered emo­tion­al ter­rain and see life anew. This is cin­e­ma as por­tal for lost mem­o­ries. It’s the prod­uct of a mas­ter filmmaker.