TIFF16 Film #1

Reason for Pick – Eli’s Hayes’ review out of Cannes

Toni Erdmann is a complex dance that paints the outline of the relationship between a lonely father and his career occupied daughter who's living abroad.

I went in with the impression that this was going to be two hours and forty minutes of non-stop laughter. It isn’t. While there are frequent laugh-out-loud moments, and two scenes that sends the audience into fits, the remainder ranges from poignant to painful to awkward. Writer / Director Maren Ade isn’t afraid to linger on a shot, often cutting a few seconds after the natural beat, which gives a feeling of reality over scripted drama. She also isn’t afraid to use…

[8]

Well, Christian Petzold broke the ice, but it looks like Maren Ade's going to bring it home: the "Berlin School" has broken beyond the rarefied festival circuit to produce bona fide hits. What's particularly shocking about this turn of events is that, unlike other segments of the austere art-film universe, the Berlin School appears to have crossed over into the mainstream almost by accident. Apart from slightly more direct plotting, there's nothing about Petzold's Phoenix that made it inherently more accessible than his earlier films. And now, Ade gives us Toni Erdmann, a generational comedy that, at its core, is about the inappropriate character and unavoidable embarrassment that accompanies "humor" between the generations.

Ade has long been the stealth…

Berlin based director Maren Ade has to be amongst the most exciting auteurs working in 2017 and Toni Erdmann her third feature is her most accomplished work yet.
Ines a powerful and successful business women is visited by her father and their relationship undergoes an intense alternative therapy experiment, at the hands of her eccentric and lonely father.
Shot in a kind of cinéma-vérité style the film is reliant on a tangible plausibility, from Ines corporate world, to the sterile backdrop of nondescript Romanian hotel rooms, this is a recognisable reality.
Peter Simonischek as TE excels in his loving understated role but the absolute revelation for me has to be Sandra Hüller as Ines, the depressed daughter, that truly shines…

"Don't lose the humour"

Toni Erdmann is the two and a half hour German comedy film you didn't realise you needed in your life.

To be fair, comedy is perhaps stretching it a bit. Whilst there are some laughs, including one true laugh-out-loud moment for me, it's much more of a dramady in keeping with what writer/director Maren Ade reputedly told her co-producer; "This will not be a comedy. This will be a very long and sad film"

Essentially a film about a father's attempts at getting his brittle careerist daughter to reconnect and lighten up by using an eccentric and intrusive alter-ego who labours under the prophetically honest falsehood of 'life coach', Toni Erdmann pitches the baby boomer generation…