Maren Ade’s latest film is typically awkward, surreal and hilarious

By L.R.S.

This article contains plot details of “Toni Erdmann”

SHE is a master of the socially painful and the uncomfortably hilarious. Maren Ade’s first feature film, “The Forest For The Trees” (2003), chronicled the social and professional humiliations of a young teacher in a new town; the German word fremdschämen (meaning a deep embarrassment on behalf of someone else) might as well have been invented to describe the audience’s reaction. “Everyone Else” (2009), which won a Silver Bear at the Berlinale film festival, featured a young couple stumbling over the mismatch between a commitment to modern gender roles and a secret envy of those leading more traditional lives. Her unflinching attitude to embarrassment makes her work stand out in the world of German independent cinema, which can veer towards the overly inward or the boorishly moralising.

Her latest feature, “Toni Erdmann”, continues to explore the routine humiliations of modern life; audience members were left in tears at its world premiere in Cannes earlier this year. Its premise is fairly conventional: a hippie-ish father tries to reconnect with his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), a grown-up, recalcitrant woman focused on her career as a management consultant for an oil company in Romania. When the rebuffed dad resorts to adopting a fake persona to worm his way into her life, the narrative quickly takes a surreal turn.

Throughout the film, a series of comic set-pieces pits father Winfried (Peter Simonischek) against daughter in an environment populated by a motley crew of bosses, lovers and Romanian oil workers. When Ines blanks her father at a cocktail reception he has tagged along to, Winfried strikes up a conversation with the client she is trying to woo, telling him about his recent decision to acquire a replacement daughter: “Mine is never at home, and this one even cuts my toenails”. When Ines tells him to go home and leave her alone, he ostensibly complies, only to reappear in his new get-up as “Toni Erdmann”, business coach extraordinaire. In a particularly outrageous move, “Toni Erdmann” crashes a dinner with her girlfriends, with all but Ines clueless as to the identity of their strange companion. Ines, loath to be embarrassed yet again, is forced to play along, reluctantly making small talk with her “new” acquaintance.

Ms Ade has said that one motive for making “Toni Erdmann” was a desire to explore how children are embarrassed by their parents. Some of its comedy, like the central role played by a pair of false teeth, was inspired by jokes she shared with her own father. Maybe this is why the tension between Winfried and Ines feels so acute and true to life: Prospero barely recovered from a scene in which Winfried bullies Ines to perform Whitney Houston’s version of “The Greatest Love of All” in front of a group of middle-aged ladies at an Easter-egg painting party. It is hardly possible to imagine a less appropriate environment for impromptu karaoke. The conflicting emotions on Ms Hüller’s face are a joy to watch as she complies, first reluctantly, then enthusiastically, only to check herself and rush out the door in a huff, leaving her father to explain her hasty departure to their hosts. Ms Hüller and Mr Simonischek wear the signs of their conflict throughout: Ines never quite sheds her pained look of mild irritation; Winfried (even as “Toni Erdmann”) looks constantly dazed.

Even when the focus shifts away from the primary father-daughter relationship, Ade’s astute gift of observation and farcical humour is unrelenting. Ines’s handling of euphemistic management consulting jargon is pitch-perfect; the not-quite-there English she and her colleagues use to communicate serves as effective shorthand for their discomfort and unease. Even minor characters are drafted into Ms Ade’s cringe-inducing plotlines; Ines forces her assistant (Ingrid Bisu) to lend her a shirt after a disastrous attempt to pop a blister has spilt blood all over her own. Ines has the girl strip down to her bra in the ladies’ toilet only to complain about the dollish cut of her blouses. The scene exposes both Ines’s control-freak ways and the assistant’s slavish devotion to the woman on whose power she depends.

There is always a danger of such relentless farce growing tired, particularly when a film runs for almost three hours. But “Toni Erdmann” pulls it off by maintaining a balance between crazed, comical scenes and more subdued moments; the actors, too, manage these changes in mood with an impressive precision and comic timing. It occasionally veers close to cliché—such as when Winfried and Ines have a slightly too right-on debate about the moral quandaries of late capitalism on an oil field in rural Romania—but Ms Ade swiftly disrupts the mood with another absurd turn. Even in the story’s tender moments, when reconciliation seems possible, father and daughter do not find comfort in each other. Rather, they remember that they share a taste for asserting themselves by disorienting others.

After all the mortification the characters have to suffer, it might have been tempting to let the film end on a cheesy note, where the lonely, frustrated career woman sees the error of her ways and reconciles with her loving father. But Ms Ade stays true to form. Cinema-goers will leave “Toni Erdmann” with a feeling that love and wacky humour do not conquer all. They can merely provide momentary salve for the despairs of modern life—much like a film by Maren Ade.

“Toni Erdmann” will screen in selected cinemas in America from December 25. It will be on general release in Britain from February 3.