Aiming to reunite with his daughter, who has long lived on her own, elderly Winfried comes to visit her in Bucharest without warning as Toni Erdmann, an invented character.
Maren Ade's most famous film is an eccentric tragicomedy and a surgically accurate film about parents and children in an age of disintegrating intergenerational and personal ties.
Fun-loving and imaginative Winfried, a former music teacher, strives to forge a relationship with his adult daughter Ines, a busy employee of a global corporation. As Winfried hardly sees her, hears from her or knows anything about her, he even jokes that he hired someone to play her role. To grab his daughter’s attention, he pretends to be a strange businessman named Toni Erdmann and, without asking, visits Ines in Bucharest, where she has an important business operation planned. Hoping to win a place in her heart with hilarious and shocking antics that leave heads spinning, Winfred manipulates Ines into a reciprocal and no less crazy game.
Toni Erdmann is the third film by Maren Ade, who is formally part of the Berlin School, a group of young German directors who emerged in the early 2000s united by a mutual interest in the era of late capitalism, an analytical approach to reality, and the exposure of its invisible mechanisms. While all this is present in Toni Erdmann, here it is the source of a more complex and wider look at the modern individual, who wears multiple guises and social masks, which can be very confusing.
Working on the territory of social realism, Ade quietly explodes it from the inside, incorporating convention and theatricality. The film naturally balances between minimalism and burlesque, office dress code and grotesque, docurealism and absurdist carnival, while its romantic, deceptively Hollywood view of people and relationships is rendered through critical optics. A sensation at the 69th Cannes Film Festival, Toni Erdmann was named the best film of 2016 by the FIPRESCI International Federation of Film Critics.
The film will be screened in German, English, and Romanian with Russian subtitles.
Toni Erdmann
Dir. Maren Ade
Germany, Austria, Romania, France, 2016. 162 min. 18+