TONI ERDMANN written and directed by Maren Ade, starring Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek and Michael Wittenborn. A Mongrel Media release. 162 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (January 27). See listing and review.
Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann – honoured earlier this month by the Toronto Film Critics Association with awards for best director, best actress and best foreign-language film and nominated earlier this week for a best foreign-language film Oscar – is a movie about alienation and depression. It’s about fathers and daughters. It’s about globalization and corporate structure. It’s about two and three-quarter hours long.
And it’s a comedy.
If you’re thinking these individual elements would seem more the stuff of drama… well, yeah. But as Ade tells me when we sit down at TIFF before Toni’s Canadian premiere, the heavier elements are crucial to the laughs.
Having made two intimate dramas, The Forest For The Trees and Everyone Else, Ade decided she wanted to try her hand at comedy.
“And then, while writing, I found out that [since] I come so much from the drama, it had to be there as well,” she said. “A good comedy needs big drama.”
The drama in Toni Erdmann is rooted in the lives of Ines (Sandra Hüller), a corporate consultant trying to finesse a business deal in Bucharest, and her father, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a piano teacher in Germany. She’s unhappy he’s clearly lonely. When Winfried visits Ines, he impulsively decides to insert himself into her career as an eccentric “life coach” called Toni Erdmann. Ines goes along with it to avoid embarrassment – and to figure out what he wants – and that’s when the comedy starts.
“With that guy, I could do anything,” she says. “Anything could happen. And it’s always good to have strong contrasts, so this corporate world was very well suited as a stage for him.”
Ade says she found inspiration for the impulsive Winfried – who always pops in a set of ridiculous false teeth to shift into “funny” mode – in her own father.
“He’s kind of a jokester – is that the word?” she asks. “Someone who’s joking all the time. And there was a time when he was really doing the thing with the false teeth. Just at little moments, but I liked that switch – him putting them in when he wanted to tell us something very serious. With a joke like that, you laugh maybe four times, and after that it becomes something else. And I found that interesting, so I borrowed these little things from him.”
She’s quick to stress that Ines and Winfried’s relationship, which has curdled over time and distance, is entirely invented. It’s part of a larger metaphor about growing up and defining oneself.
“I think family can be something very static,” she says. “You can change a lot in your life, but not your relationship to your family. Where you come from is a heavy topic, in a way. So I liked this idea that two family members try to come closer through role-playing.”
That was the core of Toni Erdmann, which took two years to write.
“I’m, like, digging a hole and I come out somewhere,” Ade says, adding that much of that time involved researching Ines’s corporate life.
“Before I started with this, I would never read the economy part of newspapers,” she laughs. “I’d just set it aside and read the rest. But I met a lot of women working in the business world, and I travelled to Romania, then went back to writing.”
Slowly, she realized the pages were piling up.
“Everybody said, ‘It’s good, it has a good flow,’” Ade recalls of the early script readings, “and we really didn’t talk so much about the length. But while shooting the film, I thought, ‘Ah, it’s getting long.’”
The length is essential, she explains, because the comedy comes from the awkwardness and tension Ines experiences once Toni arrives in her life.
“I didn’t know at any point where to make it shorter, because you need to know how she gets from A to B to C,” Ade says. “And that was the thing with the whole movie. You need the time before something new happens, this moment of wondering what’s coming. The characters also needed that time, where they don’t know how to continue with the game they’re playing.”
She did try to cut a shorter version of the film, “like 10 minutes shorter, maybe, but it felt longer.
“It’s fragile. It has to be like that.”
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
