Piyush Roy
By the time you read this piece,Toni Erdmann may have added yet another honour to its fast crowding crowning glory – the Best Foreign Film Award at the Golden Globes this year. The film is already touted a favourite in the category when the Oscars are presented next month, after having swept all the major honours at the 29thEuropean Film awards for 2016 – Best Film, Director, Screenwriter, Actor and Actress.
Bitter, sweet, tragic, comic, weird, wild, shocking, sensational, imaginative, humane… and also for some, the ‘most embarrassing’ film of last year; just sieve through the review highlights on the film’s poster and you too might start wondering whether watching the film might be a treat or a travesty!
Films like Toni Erdmann, do not happen often, and when they do, they redefine cinema, and restore our faith in the immense possibilities and the unpredictability that a daring storyteller can achieve with the ‘seventh art’.
To be honest, Toni Erdmann, is not an easy film to watch, especially at its near three-hour long length, with relentless twiststhat keep its unusual family drama going crazier, every time you think it’s telling is about to hit a close.
Simply put, the film is about the efforts of a father trying to reconnect with his adult daughter.It revolves around Ines (Sandra Hüller), a stressed-out, workaholic German management consultant based in Bucharest, who receives an unexpected visit from her father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a music teacher, who assumes the persona of a life coach called‘Toni Erdmann’, with a zany wig, fake teeth and puppy cushions to get Ines back to her old self. In the process the film offers some critical notes on lifestyle today, especially living with the consequences of neoliberalism, wherein all human interactions are increasingly getting reduced to market relationsdictated by a relentless striving for goals sans pause.
Ines is an ambitious corporate, who is constantly on the phone even on rare visits to the family. She can be seen working at home, working at odd hours, thinking about work at home and even going to parties to just ‘net-work’. She seeks quick relaxationin drinks, kinks, exotic massages and sin foods; but is never really there in any moment of pleasure or pursuit to relish those experiences.
As the modern mechanised life increasingly turns its young achieversalmost robotic; programmed to their needs, drives and even pleasures, the change but naturally bogglesthose from a more ‘relaxed’ generation before. Ines’ father is no exception. The disconnect between his and his daughter’s youth makes him exasperatedly ask his ‘workaholic’ child, “Are you really human?”According to the film’s director, Maren Ade, “The film is a tragedy, in which the father plays the comedy”.
The exasperation of the previous generation with the present, the older with the young, the villager or small towner with the city slicker, parents with children and their lifestyle today is offered as a comedy of deliberate errors featuring a German father-daughter pair that unfolds around the daughter’s work place in Romania. The lament howeveris fundamental, because the questions and the concerns are universal.
Early in the film, when both dad and daughter are relaxing in a high-end spa, off a relentlessly busy week at work for the daughter, noticing that she is continuously on call with hardly any time to savour a massage or a costly brunch of club sandwich with champagne, he wonders, ‘if she is happy (ever)’. Their conversation thus unfolds:
Father: So are you a bit happy here (in the spa), at least?
Daughter: What do you mean by ‘happiness’? It’s such a strong word.
Father: I mean do you have a bit of life, too?
Daughter: Like going to the movies or something…
Father: Well yes… just doing something you enjoy.
Daughter: Lots of words around here ‘fun’, ‘happiness’, ‘life’… We should sort it out. So what do you think it’s worth living for?
Had the father answered that loaded question with some ready pop wisdom, it could have been a clap worthy moment, even quotable, but it may not have been impacting enough for the daughter, because her attitude at that moment is confrontational. The director desists from that temptation. Instead, she takes us through a rigmarole of the daughter’s experiences, moments odd and even, few failed expectations, moderate successes, a death, a crisis in existence and an unexpected comedy at its lady protagonist’s birthday party, before getting the father to answer, only at the end.
He says, “You had asked what’s the worth of living? The problem is that it’s so often about getting things done. You do this, you do that and in the meantime life just passes by. But how are we supposed to hang on to moments? Now I sometimes sit and remember how you learned to ride your bike or how I once found you at a bus stop… But you only realise that afterwards. In the moment itself, it’s not possible”.
Think about it, and also think about this life evaluating quote from the Bible, ‘What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?’
