Film Review: Toni Erdmann

Director: Maren Ade

Producers: Maren Ade, Jonas Dornbach, Janine Jackowski, Michel Merkt

Cast: Peter Simonischeck, Sandra Hüller, Ingrid Bisu, Vlad Ivanov, Trystan Pütter, Lucy Russell, Hadewych Minis, Michael Wittenborn

Running time: 2h 42min

            Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann is a hilariously human observation of the complex relationship between a father and daughter. This film serves out everything you could possibly want from a two hour and forty-five minute Germany comedy: nude parties, existentialism and a nine-foot tall furry Kukeri costume.

This film masters both subtle and overt comedy with the actors’ well attuned timing and some bright moments of full-on ridiculousness, including some impromptu Whitney Houston karaoke and one of the best nude scene in cinema. Ade creates beautiful moments of comedy through the tension of everyday experiences. The pace of the film provides a wonderfully realistic experience: there are big, funny moments and crushingly depressing lows but also less active times, giving you an opportunity to marinate on the characters and their experiences. The ebb and flow of this film gives it a life of its own and allows you to really feel the characters evolving.

            Toni Erdmann is a persona put on by Winfried Conradi, played by Peter Mimonischeck, in order to get the attention of his workaholic daughter, Ines, played by Sandra Hüller. After feeling snubbed by his brief visit from his daughter in Germany, Winfried spontaneously decides to visit Ines at her office in Bucharest, Romania. Upon seeing that Ines life is not going as well as she always claimed, he returns under the guise of Toni Erdmann. Knowing that the only way to be a part of Ines’ business-first world is to infiltrate it, Winfried suits up in his trusty fake teeth, an ill-fitting suit and a shaggy red wig. Winfried’s intrusion on Ines life is a source of frustration for her, but she finally comes around to her father’s more relaxed and silly lifestyle. When Ines is finally at the end of her patience, she and Winfried share a touching moment in a park wearing nothing but a bath robe and a giant furry Kukeri suit, respectively.

Ade has Simonischeck’s character put on the conspicuously ridiculous persona of Toni Erdmann to show how much of our own public identity is a performance. Most of Ines’ job is about making the right connections and saying the right things. After her first big presentation, Ines Skypes in with her business coach, hoping to work on her “body language” as though her unconscious movements were something that could be trained. Ines coworkers only care about the bottom line and they are wiling to go as far as to fire a menial worker for a joke or do unspeakable things to a cupcake just to close a deal. Seeing how draining her lifestyle has become, Ines eventually succumbs to her father’s silly hijinks. Toni’s antics wear her down and then build her back up again. The father-daughter team are at their funniest when working together. Speaking in their private and silent language they introduce Toni into the fast-paced world of business consulting. With Toni around, Ines is finally able to see exactly how ridiculous her lifestyle is and begins to unhinge a little more each day. Ines finally throws in the towel for her high-paced business lifestyle at her birthday brunch, which had become more of team-building exercise than a social gathering. Unable to zip up her tight birthday dress on her own or put on her high heels, Ines decides to just open the door naked. She suggests, in total Toni Erdmann fashion, that she is in fact holding a naked brunch (for team-building, of course) and anyone who showed up with clothes on was not invited. Each ring of the doorbell ensued fits of laughter from the audience because it promised another terribly awkward moment of tension for her colleagues that Ines handled with the quiet grace of a woman who just doesn’t care anymore.

Ade builds her characters around tropes in cinema but succeeds in pushing past those stereotypes by giving them creating such rich and odd personalities. Ines is more than just the the overworked childless career woman and Winfried is more than the silly, out-of-touch old dad. They’re both lost souls looking to sort out some meaning in their lives. Winfried knows that Ines is not as happy as she always reports and after seeing the effects of her high pressure job, he realizes this is no way for his daughter to live. Winfried even goes as far as to ask Ines what she even lives for and in reply she asks if he himself has any plans in life beyond, “slipping fart cushions under people”. Ines and Winfried share an equal and opposite disappointment for each other but eventually find a mutual understanding through their hijinks. As they both struggle to find some meaning in life, Ade seems to suggest that maybe the most important part of life is just being silly.

This film hit every cord of human emotion with both its subtlety and its blatant hilarity. By the end I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, cringe, or call my dad.

Film Review: Ma Loute

Director: Bruno Dumont

Producers: Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Bréhat, Muriel Merlin

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Luchini, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jean-Luc Vincent, Didier Desprès, Laura Dupré, Brandon Lavieville, Angélique Vergara, Cyril Rigaux, Raph

Running time: 2h 2min

            Bruno Dumont’s Slack Bay (Ma Loute) is beautiful and strange like nothing I’ve ever seen. The narrative follows two families in an inlet off the coast of France at opposite ends of the social spectrum: the Bruforts, fishermen in the bay, and the Van Peteghems, bourgeoisie tourists. When people start to go missing in Slack Bay, bumbling local police chief Machin and his diminutive partner Malfoy come in to investigate but without much success. André and Isabelle Van Peteghem, the owners of Typhonium, the massive Egyptian style villa overlooking the bay, are eccentric, to say the leas, and are endlessly charmed by the quaint culture of the mussel gatherers. The Van Peteghems, like many of the characters, are prone to fits of passion and excitement that often find them falling down to the ground or even off a cliff. The cast seemed to really take to the theatrics of their ridiculous characters and Dumont, perhaps intentionally, did very little to rein that in. In fact, it was the subtler characters who really stole the show, like the Van Peteghem’s niece, Billie, daughter of Aude Van Peteghem, André’s sister.

While visiting the bay one day, Billie strikes an interest in Ma Loute Brufort, the son of a mussel farmer in the bay who makes his living taking tourists across the bay. Billie is known to frequently dress as a boy and is referred to by her mother with male pronouns. Billie herself claims that she is a girl, “in disguise”. The treatment of Billie’s gender is a minor detail in the film that doesn’t seem to bother Ma Loute and at most seems to slightly confuse the investigators. Billie is equally unfazed by Ma Loute’s low-brow demeanor and even his habit of cannibalism. In a more traditional film, the budding romance between Ma Loute and Billie might serve to close the class divide evident between the two families, but Dumont has different ideas about wealth disparity. Ma Loute ends up in the arms of the incompetent maid of Typhonium, a young woman named Nadège who often left the Van Peteghem’s going hungry because she could never manage to serve from the left.

In a film this absurd, even something like cannibalism seems quirky than horrifying. The Brufort children circle around a bucket, chewing on shiny ruby red chunks of flesh that are somewhat ambiguous until their mother comes outside, holding a human foot and asking if anyone wanted any toes. Only the crystalline cinematography of Guillaume Deffontaines and the idyllic setting of the French coast could make such a scene so comfortable and even pleasurable. The sense of comfort with the cannibalism may also be attributed to how inhuman all of the characters seems to be, Aude and Isabelle Van Peteghem swing around like raging puppets and the bloated chief Machin waddles and crashes like an unbalanced top. One of the most distinct features of this film is the elastic sound of movement. The vacationers especially sound as though they were made out of plastic, making a statement about the vapid and inauthentic nature of the elite. The cannibalism itself is a manifestation of the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots. In the world of early twentieth century Europe, in which the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer, the Bruforts found a way to reverse this class dominance by capturing and eating unassuming tourists who view them as nothing more than scenery. The investigators never catch on to the Bruforts scheme and are perfectly happy to come home and be celebrated after finding a few of the missing beachgoers in a net on the beach.

The rich palette of blues is complemented by soft whites and yellows rounds out the widescreen shots, making the eye desperate to catch every detail. The film closes with its most stunning scene yet, a painterly and entirely empty beachscape with the exception of the neat line of the cast chasing down the inspector who had finally blown up so large that he began to float away.

The humor of the film is almost exclusively physical and deceptively dry. At times the film seems to reference and take pleasure in its own absurdity. In a particularly drawn out and non sequitur trumpet solo performed by the troops sent out to look for some of the missing beachgoers, the background soldiers squirm and shift on their feet like actors between shots. Some of the physical gags do grow weaker through repetition. After all, one can only laugh at a fat guy falling down a sand dune so many times. The best characters to laugh at were the ones that seemed to take themselves the most seriously, if nothing else but for the incongruity of their polished appearance and ridiculous actions.

Slack Bay was captivating in its scene dressing and had me laughing throughout the entire film without telling a single joke. Dumont nailed the inconsistencies of elite life, sweeping from grotesque extremes of Rococo splendor to muddy squalor.

Mini Review: Loving

Director: Jeff Nichols

Producers: Nancy Buirski, Ged Doherty, Colin Firth, Sarah Green, Peter Saraf, Marc Turtletaub

Cast: Joel Edgerton, Michael Shannon, Ruth Negga, Marton Csokas, Nick Kroll, Alano Miller, Bill Camp, Jon Bass, Sharon Blackwood

Running time: 2 h 3 min

            Interracial couple Richard and Mildred Loving fight for their right to marriage in Jeff Nichols’ Loving. Beyond creating a beautiful film, Nichols manages to anchor his argument for human rights by telling a human story. The history of this court case is important but it’s nothing you couldn’t read out a newspaper. The film speaks beyond its subject’s own history because it is rooted in the universal experience of the pursuit of happiness. The treatment of sound uses expert subtlety to evoke suspense in order to create the experience of fear and uncertainty in a story we all already know the ending to. Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as Richard and Mildred Loving live out Nichols’ vision of humility and bravery without becoming archetypal heroes. In a world in which many are still fighting for their right to a normal life, Nichols reminds us that marriage is a human entitlement and not a political statement in this refreshingly human biopic.