Sydney Film Festival: Toni Erdmann
Rather than stick to a straight and narrow narrative, Toni Erdmann takes the time to weave deeper stories into its dense fabric. Our unlikely protagonist, Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek), is an interminably disheveled music teacher who resides with his loyal but ailing dog, Willi.
When his aging mother asks why he hasn’t yet put Willi to sleep, Winfried playfully responds that he hasn’t put her down yet either. But the narrative that stems between Winfried and Willi is painfully cut short, and Winfried drifts off to Bucharest to reconnect with his estranged daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller).
Ines is a career-driven consultant trying to inveigle herself in the swathe of European companies taking advantage of Romania’s rapid economic expansion. Sensing Ines’ latent melancholia, Winfried makes it his raison d’être to make her laugh – adopting various props and disguises as he runs rings around her unsuspecting colleagues. Making small talk with one of Ines’ prospective clients, Winfried tells him he’s had to hire a substitute daughter in Ines’ place, but he needs to clarify that he is just making a joke.
Humourlessness it seems, is endemic – after all, Winfried’s ‘joke’ is not dissimilar from Ines’ proposal of outsourcing to cut costs. The film movingly juxtaposes industry and poverty, particularly when Winfried’s ‘consultant and coach’ ego Toni Erdmann manages to ingratiate himself into a rig-worker’s humble home.
Winfried’s indissoluble openness starts to wear away at Ines’ tough exterior, but Ines knows that openness is vulnerability – a quality that does not bode well in the unforgiving world of big business.
At 162 minutes, director Maren Ade allows her scenes to amble, at times recalling neo-realist master Vittorio de Sica’s extended scenes in Umberto D. and Bicycle Thieves. Unlike de Sica however, her meandering allows tragedy to develop into farce.
Without ruining the scene, when Hüller finally reaches breaking point and literally strips away her corporate disguise at a work event, the scene very slowly evolves from agony to absolute hysterics in one of the most finely crafted slapstick scenes in modern cinema.
Simonischek imbues Winfried’s full and frail character with a beguiling mix of tenderness and comedy reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, pulling us through the undulating extremes of laughter and woe with supreme grace.
As his foil, Hüller manages to stay both straight-faced and fully-fledged, not allowing Ines’ career focus to become the toxic cliché of a woman out of place in a man’s world.
When Winfried presses her about the meaning of life, she puts the question right back on him: “Do you have any plans in life other than slipping fart cushions under people?” The answer lies somewhere in-between. After all, sometimes we need to drift into detours in order to get back on course.
