Toni Erdmann

Maren Ade's 2016 film, Toni Erdmann is like an iceberg -- two-thirds of the essential narrative is submerged and, therefore, invisible to the eye.  I have a sense that the director became enamored with the title character, a person who really doesn't exist even within the frame of the film, and may have lost control of certain aspects of the plot -- it's like Falstaff seizing Shakespeare's imagination in the history plays involving Henry V.  The movie is very long, 165 minutes, and, yet, it feels strangely foreshortened, abbreviated in some ways, with essential integument excised.  The version that premiered in German cinemas last year is probably edited down from an initial cut that was much longer.  Even so, there is a novelistic density of detail and an encyclopedic scope of reference in the 165 minute film that is remarkable.  To understand what seems to have been omitted, of course, it's necessary for me to summarize briefly what Ade shows us.

Winfried Conradi is a retired music teacher, probably in his early seventies.  He apparently lives in Aachen with his old and sick dog.  Conradi's daughter, Ines, is a successful executive with a multi-national oil corporation.  She is single, fantastically hardworking, and estranged from her father -- this estrangement is not dramatic; there is no trauma that has created the distance between daughter and father.  Like the busy younger generation in Ozu's Tokyo Story (a film that Toni Erdmann resembles slightly), Ines is simply too busy to take time for her father.  Furthermore, on first blush, her analytical, no-nonsense personality clashes violently with her father's zany and wildly extroverted, even confrontational, self-presentation.  In fact, and I am indebted to a critic on Roger Ebert's blog for this notion, the acorn has not fallen too far from the tree and Ines turns out to be just aggressively weird and nonconformist as her father.  During a strained visit to Aachen, Conradi senses that Ines is unhappy.  They part on bad terms when he asks her invasive questions about how she perceives the meaning of her life.  When his dog dies, Conradi, goes to Bucharest where Ines is pursuing a contract as a consultant to a Rumanian oil company.  Wearing an unruly "fright" wig and decked-out with protruding "buck" teeth, a sort of Spencer's Gifts gag outfit, Conradi harasses Ines at work, inserting himself into her professional activities.  At various times, he pretends to be Toni Erdmann, a wealthy German émigré and Ines' "life coach"; on other occasions, he acts as an imposter, claiming that he is the German ambassador to Rumania.  Conradi haunts his daughter's business meetings and attends various business-related parties with her -- there is lot of lavish business-entertaining in this film, some of it involving cocaine.  At several gatherings, Conradi playing the role of Erdman says that his daughter is distant and preoccupied by work and that he has had to hire another young woman to impersonate his daughter.  ("She cuts my toenails," Erdmann proudly proclaims and he suggests renting family members to wealthy Germans might be a good industry for the impoverished Rumanians to pursue.) These antics lead to a series of increasingly explosive encounters with his daughter.  Ultimately, Ines, driven to distraction, begins to act erratically herself.  After belting out a Whitney Houston tune at a family party that Erdmann and she have crashed, Ines greets guests at her birthday brunch the next day stark naked.  She claims that the nudity is a "team-building" exercise.  After the disastrous nude brunch, Ines quits her job with the multi-national company exploiting the Rumanian oil fields for work with another big corporation with offices in Singapore.  At the funeral of her grandmother, Ines sees her father once more.  His father expresses his hopes that she will make the best of her life and be happy.  She briefly dons his gag false teeth and wears a bucolic-looking straw hat.  But it's a momentary rapprochement and the film ends with a long shot of Ines standing alone in the back yard of someone's home in Aachen.  Nothing much has changed and she intends to be in Singapore for the next two years.  

This outline doesn't hint at the complexity of the film and its novelistic dimensions.  Among other things, the film addresses very intelligently issues such as European feminism and the "glass ceiling," the Rumanian oil industry and poverty in that nation, infighting among close colleagues in business, painting Easter eggs in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and problems caused  by the EU and the increasing globalization of multi-national corporations.  In particular, about a third of the film is devoted to Ines' intricate scheming with respect to the business enterprises that she serves -- an important aspect of the film is its demonstration (by showing not telling) that Ines is much more competent, ruthless, and brilliant than any of her male counterparts, (although she has a man for a boss) and that she is as aggressive in her world as her father is within his sphere.  (We see Conradi in Aachen leading a choir dressed and made-up as zombies singing a song about death to High School students; when he loses his last piano student, he mournfully says:  "But I bought the piano just for you" before admitting this is "just a joke" and, when an Amazon package is delivered to his house, he calls for his brother, says the man is a mail-bomber, and, then in costume as Toni Erdmann, terrorizes the postal delivery worker.  During most of the Aachen scenes, Conradi wears stark white zombie make-up and has a smear of blood painted around his lips.)  There is so much in the film that it is surprising that, in some ways, we know so little about the characters.  Conradi and Ines have no back-story; we don't know anything about Ines' mother or what her relationship was like with the eccentric Winfried; I'm guessing the funeral at the film's end involves Ines' grandmother and Conradi's mother but this is never clearly established.  We don't really know anything about Conradi's relationship with Ines before the movie begins.  Conradi has an uncanny capability of tracking Ines and appearing wherever she goes -- how does he do that?  A very important scene involves Ines and Erdmann at an Easter party -- I wasn't able to figure out how Erdmann got the invitation to the party and how he managed to find the place.  From time to time, you have the feeling that expository information has ended up on the cutting room floor.  Ade uses no establishing shots -- this leads to momentary confusion:  are we in Aachen or Bucharest?  Conradi's appearances disrupting Ines' business and personal affairs seem increasingly uncanny.  The unheimlich aspect of these interventions is signified by Conradi's make-up as a zombie at the film's beginning and his appearance in the vast and furry body of a Bulgarian kukeri at Ines' naked brunch.  In contrast with the other guests, who are either completely, or almost, nude, Conradi rings the doorbell covered from head to foot in a costume simulating bear fur.  He wears a massive globular head-piece from which protrudes a staff decorated with bells and tassels.  (Kukeri are costumed mummers whose appearance is apotropaic -- they are supposed to ward off evil spirits; their role in folk traditions in the Balkans dates back to Greek times -- it is surmised that they may be representations of Dionysius.)  In an alarming sequence, Conradi can't get the Kukeri helmet off his head and the audience fears that he will suffocate in the hot costume -- it seems to be a warm day and everyone else is lightly dressed.) In his Kukeri costume, Conradi seems more approachable and the irritable Ines actually embraces him when he is dressed as a monster. 

Toni Erdmann belongs to an old and honorable genre of films -- the mismatched buddy or "odd couple" movie.  Initially, the film works with energy generated from the contrast between the apparently laid-back, comical, and mischievous father and his tight-laced, highly disciplined daughter.  But the film is unhurried and its length allows Ade to demonstrate that father and daughter are not that different in their aggressive approach to the world.  As described, the movie seems slightly sentimental, the wacky antics of the old pensioner played for laughs.  But this would be a misperception of the film:  Winfried Conradi's harassment of his daughter is maniacal and obsessive, even, as I have previously observed, uncanny.  There is a distinct sadistic edge to his impersonations and much of what he does seems to be directed toward humiliating and shaming Ines.  If he is acting from love, it is an odd Teutonic sort of love.  Indeed, in his manic impersonations, Winfried Conradi seems just as single-minded and disciplined as his daughter.  What's more, he doesn't seem to be having that much fun -- Conradi is the kind of deadpan joker who says the most outrageous things without providing any evidence that he is joking.  We rarely see him smile except with the prosthetic teeth protruding from his lips.  Ines is equally confrontational and perverse -- we discover this in her peculiar approach to sex.  She has a boyfriend among her colleagues, a little vain fellow, who fancies himself a great ladies' man.  Ines makes him masturbate for her amusement, demanding that he ejaculate on a room service petites four with the promise that she will eat the semen-soaked comestible once he has finished.  And she goes far beyond any of her father's antics in orchestrating the naked brunch, a stunt that she engineers out of annoyance that the zippers on her tight clothing are inaccessible.  (The stunt is also intended to draw attention to the pervasive sexual harassment in the workplace -- by appearing stark naked at the brunch, she draws attention to, and defuses, the sexual undertones in the consulting firm:  in this milieu, women are supposed to dress seductively and be available for flirtations with the customers -- so why not just appear naked?)  There is another sinister element in Ines' conduct -- she's just as nasty, or, even, nastier than the men (when she gets blood on her blouse, she makes her adoring assistant change blouses with her).  But she doesn't seem to get much joy out of coldly dominating others -- for much of the film, she seems profoundly depressed, taking refuge in long naps; Ines literally sleeps through much of the movie.

Toni Erdmann is full of small telling details.  For instance, when Winfried's dog dies, the sick animal, too weak to go inside the house, apparently crawls off to die under a bush.  Winfried is keeping a vigil next to the sick dog and has fallen asleep.  When he awakes the dog is missing and he finds the body a few yards away under the shrubbery.  I have personally seen dogs act in this way and the film is packed with verismo -- realistic details of this kind.  But, at its essence, Toni Erdmann is a kind of half-crazed fairy tale, a film that features the appearance of a furry monster at its climax.  The actors playing Ines and Winfried are on the screen either together or alternatively in every shot in the film and their performances are memorable and could not be bettered.  Although its a long film, Toni Erdmann is never less than compelling and boasts several scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny.  It's one of the best pictures of the year. (Hollywood has its claws in this film:  we understand a remake is under way -- Robin Williams would have been ideal in the part of the old man; perhaps, Louis C. K. can play the role.)