Toni Erdmann (2016)

Watching this movie feels like standing in a cool, empty room and looking at a piece of abstract modern art. It's bizarre, disturbing and confusing. You can try to analyse, what the filmmakers intentions were or what may symbolise something, if you like doing that. The most obvious message of the movie (spend more time with your family) appears quite trivial. Some parts are somewhat funny because of the extreme absurdness of the events (don't expect subtlety). The laughter, however, mostly sticks in your throat. The characters are hard to understand, let alone identify with. There are a lot of silent moments, in which you get the chance to feel into the characters, only you don't feel much more than awkwardness. If you're looking for entertainment or something to take from it, I recommend you don't watch this film. If you like "art projects", naked people or unorthodox film making, it may be of interest.

Fmovies: Maren Ade has created an opus which may be regarded as a universal comment on our global system where everything seems to be fine as long as economical progress is ongoing. However, we should not forget that pure progress induces dark sides as well.

"Toni Erdmann" has a great screenplay. Basically, it tells a father-daughter-story, but every sign of empathy seems to be frozen. Ines Conradi (Sandra Hüller) shows a great performance as she already did in "Amour Fou". She only lives for working and does not care much about family or emotional matters. All that counts is the progress of her career. Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) interprets a loving father who only wants to spend some time with his daughter. As Ines facade cannot be broken, he starts disturbing her perfect world of rules and manners by becoming Toni Erdmann.

The screenplay does not contain many big plot points but convinces the viewer by the development of its great characters and the intelligent and often embarrassing dialogues. The audience is trapped by the society rules of this business world. Consequently, we are feeling with Ines who is more and more irritated by her father – now transformed to Toni Erdmann. He starts to shatter the stability of the system by his strange, unconventional character and jokes. The dialogues with excellent acting are so trenchant that moments of great humor are coming up.

Everybody of the business world looks strangely at Toni Erdmann when he appears but we start thinking about who is weird and crazy in reality. Is it Toni Erdmann as he is not behaving like everybody else would expect of a supposed business man? Or is it this whole community of economists which takes drugs and which feigns emotions? Maybe Eugène Ionesco can help us to find an answer.

The film itself, most of the time taking place in Romania, only rarely shows poor people as one would assume. Most of the time we just hear about the problems of a German enterprise which has to do some outsourcing. In many scenes we can see that Ines does not really care about the people around her. She is just a representative person of the company and keeps distance. Her father, on the other hand, does not care about society rules and is able to communicate in a simple, affective way with the people of this country.

Gradually Ines is influenced by the spirit of life and the philosophy of her father as she gradually throws off her mask. What does it mean to have a life where one does not have any emotional link to his colleagues? What does it mean to see progress only but to forget that man is a social being? Even when Ines is in front of her secret lover and colleague Tim, she is not able to show any emotions.

With Patrick Orth, director Maren Ade creates a light visual style which is ideally coordinated with the actor's play. We are in a world where we cannot foresee what happens next. When Toni Erdmann appears, everything seems to start trembling. The stability of our conformist and capitalistic system is threatened by the presence of only one "strange" character.

The idea of this film deserved much better. There are so many things that could have been done, but haven't. And it lasts for almost 3 hours. An interesting satire of contemporary professional success at the cost of one's own (un)happiness. That is what it was meant to be. But the message gets diluted, there are very slow paces and redundancies that spoil the enjoyment. Some gratuitous tricks that do not lead anywhere. Moments so embarrassing that one would rather be alone when watching something like this. The father - daughter relationship that somehow barely survives through the meanderings of the film. With a good editing and a more ballsy director, it would probably have been a good movie. As such, on the current trend, it might spoil the chances of much better films of getting this year's Academy Award.

Toni Erdmann fmovies. I liked this movie a lot. I met "these" people over the last 25 years in Bucharest and in Germany.

In this "new global world", the most of the time everybody is so deep into the details of "knowing how to be" because everybody is already like this, that if you take a step back and watch from a different angle you might wonder if anyone still remembers what it is to be a human. To remember the pleasure of feeling secure and loved by the ones that are guaranteed to be the ones that will do so. And finally if you get the right angle, you have to admit that everyone around you looks ridiculously, trying to find the detail in the detail that would make a difference, even if everybody does everything identically and there is obviously nothing else. The game about being a tough global business-woman/man, up to the most disgusting proofs to be the tougher one, is finally just flat and meaningless.

The whole story is wonderful true. The actors are doing a fantastic job making you feel the frustration and discomfort that should be seen and felt by everyone living in such a world. It is not a slow movie ... it is the shortest version of an never-ending slow life with nothing that would make your heart pound for the true meanings.

This movie brought two points to my mind. Einstein defined madness: - Trying the same thing again and again while expecting a different outcome. - Google was build on the simple idea that everybody is searching for something that everybody is already mentioning... Try to type "Apple" in the Google search field

This is a great movie - but most likely not for everyone. It's about academic upper middle-class people and their family relationships. Not everybody will find that interesting and there is no usual "romantic" plot development. It's a family portrait of a father and her daughter and as such has no (plot) conclusion. It is not the usual light comedy since it touches very serious questions and the prevailing mood is unhappiness (it is however _very_ funny at times ;-)).

That being said, this movie makes some very fine and subtle observations, presents them in a funny and entertaining form yet at the same time in a thought-provoking and philosophical way which will make you think about it for a long time. If you're from an academic (german) household you will find lots of similarities in your own family relations.

This movie is not fast-paced - in fact it often has long shots of lonely people and a lot is not said but has to be filled in by the viewer. So if you don't relate to the characters this movie will feel longish for sure. But if you find traces of your own life or that of your friends and relatives you'll be amazed by the subtlety and finesse in which this movie is directed. Although there are some bizarre events, everything which happens in this movie could happen in real life. There are no implausible scenes in this movie! This is an incredible statement given the crazy and bizarre things which happen in this movie. If you wanna know how that could be true, you might wanna watch it.

This movie is one if this rare occasions that gives you the sensation you saw something very special today. It has some kind of unique comedy status like Monty Python or Bill Murray. If you think about a serious Monty Python or a more hilarious Broken Flowers you might come close to this movie.

The main theme is loneliness. A father realizes that his daughter is not happy even though she has a great career and pretends to be fine. So he tries to bring joy back in her life.

The acting is brilliant both Toni and Ines are as authentic as possible. Some scenes were so funny that i basically cried tears of joy. Especially the nude party is so ridiculous ... its actually one of best scenes i ever saw in cinema.

This is a great and very unique movie and i want to thank Maren Ade for this piece of art. Imho the best German comedy ever made. 10/10