An unusual thing happened at the Cannes film festival last May. It was an authentic surge of audience euphoria, a spontaneous burst of applause in mid-film and what’s more, it erupted at a press screening. It has been known at festivals for critics to melt on exposure to certain lighter entertainments – a Pixar animation or a breezy cinephile lark like The Artist. But a 162-minute German study of generational conflict and the perils of globalisation? It’s safe to say that no one was expecting the jolliest experience, so Toni Erdmann caught everyone unawares.
Without giving too much away, the moment in Maren Ade’s film that did the trick was a party scene in which an elderly prankster persuades his business consultant daughter to do an impromptu rendition of Whitney Houston’s glutinous anthem The Greatest Love of All, accompanying her on electric piano. It is show-stopping, cathartic and utterly joyous.
A caveat, though: the poster blurbs will tell you that Ade’s film is “achingly funny”, “anarchic”, “absolutely nuts” and it is indeed all those. But if you’re expecting an out-and-out comedy, be aware that Toni Erdmann is something more subtle: a tender piece about a man’s awkward attempts to make contact with his daughter. Side-splitting though it sometimes is, this is really a drama in which people often act in a comic way, a delicate difference that is at the root of the film’s emotional power.
“For me,” says writer-director Ade, “it’s more a film about humour – the comedy comes with the father. All he does, he does out of a big desperation. While shooting, I had the feeling this was a very sad film. I said to myself, this family topic is a heavy one, it’s melancholic because it’s so static, you cannot change where you come from. I decided not to focus so much on the comedy side.” Even so, she says, the film is funny – under the right conditions. “When the cinema is really full, it’s another film than when you watch it alone on your laptop. I’m happy that the film has these two faces.”
Despite being inexplicably passed over by the Cannes jury, Toni Erdmann is in the running as Germany’s submission to the Oscars and swept the board at December’s European film awards; as Ade pointed out on stage, it’s the first time that a film directed by a woman had won best feature. It has impressed critics in America, where it opened last month, appearing on many best films of the year lists and being hailed by the New York Times as “a thrilling act of defiance against the toxicity of doing what is expected on film, at work and out in the world”. The New Yorker called it “an important film” that “shivers with fear – of the direction Europe is going now”. It was also nominated as best foreign film in January’s Golden Globes. We speak on the phone the day after the Globes ceremony and despite losing out on an award to Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, Ade is in a positively bouncy mood.
What really struck Ade at the Globes was the excess that surrounded the main event. “For a European, it’s really a very different world. For example, when you drive there, there’s this long row of cars going very slowly, then you have all these people protesting against the Globes with signs like, ‘Warning – you’re going to hell!’ or yelling, ‘You’re a nobody!’ – which I find very funny, because that’s what the people are most afraid of who go there, that they’re a nobody.” (The protests were presumably the Westboro Baptist Church’s anti-gay, anti-abortion picket.) The worst thing about the evening, she says, was her bad timing: she missed Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump speech while she was briefly in the bar.
Ade’s third feature, and by far her most ambitious, Toni Erdmann centres on Winfried, an elderly music teacher who goes to Bucharest to visit his daughter, Ines, who has rejected his liberal values for a corporate career as a consultant advising on policy for an oil company. Ines isn’t exactly delighted by his presence but Winfried, a compulsive practical joker, can’t resist turning up inopportunely, disguised in a shaggy wig and ill-fitting false teeth as his spontaneously invented alter ego, life coach “Toni Erdmann”.
Audiences around the world should be able to connect with Winfried as a universal type: a disillusioned but indomitable 60s idealist. “For me, he’s a very typical German character,” Ade says. “His postwar generation had a very strong enemy in the generation before, which was involved in the Nationalsozialismus,” she says, slipping into German. “This conflict is the birth of his humour. It’s his language, in a way.”
You can see why Winfried is so baffled that his daughter has grown up powerfully but joylessly driven. “He gave her his values and she went out into the world and uses them in a completely different context. She works in a globalised environment, so it’s hard for him to see where it all ended up, although he should be proud that she is self-determined.”
While a comparable Hollywood film might have given a knee-jerk characterisation of Ines as a rebarbative neo-yuppie, Ade and superb female lead, Sandra Hüller, depict her as strong, conflicted and self-aware. For Ade, Ines is only too conscious of the contradictions of working in a macho business environment where even her sex life, including an excruciating tryst with a male colleague, is governed by corporate etiquette. “The thing is, she’s doing it and nobody forces her. She’s not a suppressed woman. I see her as a woman becoming more aware that she’s swallowing things that she shouldn’t and that the only one who can change things is her.”
Born in Karlsruhe in south-west Germany, Ade has put elements of her own life in Toni Erdmann, notably the fact that her father is something of a joker. Both her parents were teachers – like Winfried, her father taught music – and fake teeth played a part in her youth too. They were a promo item given away at a premiere of an Austin Powers movie where Ade was working as a volunteer before film school. “I gave them to my father and it became one of his favourite jokes, to put them in just for a few seconds – just when we’re at the traffic lights looking over at another car or when he wanted to say serious things. He has a good sense of humour and a good repertoire.”
Ade, 40, studied film in Munich and made her debut feature The Forest for the Trees (2003) as her graduation film. It’s a sober, controlled drama about an eager novice teacher whose composure gradually unravels, the film quietly becoming a sort of psychological horror story. Six years later, follow-up Everyone Else won the jury’s grand prix at the Berlin film festival. It’s essentially a two-hander about a couple – a free-spirited but neurotic music PR and her indecisive architect boyfriend – spending an increasingly tense summer in Sardinia. For that film, Ade had no shortage of models to draw on: “It was easy, because there are so many films made about couples. So there was [Ingmar Bergman’s] Scenes from a Marriage or [John Cassavetes’s] A Woman Under the Influence – that’s a film that always influences me; it’s always there.”
Toni Erdmann has some unlikelier models. One was a film that Ade loved in her teens, French comedy My Father the Hero, in which Gérard Depardieu plays a man who pretends to be his daughter’s older lover to make her look cool. “I think it still works very well. There are not so many father-daughter films.” An even odder influence came when Ade started researching comedians’ alter egos as background for Winfried/Toni and became fascinated with American provocateur Andy Kaufman and his obnoxious lounge singer persona Tony Clifton. “He was not only a comedian,” Ade says of Kaufman, “but also a real performer, an extremely special person. It’s a big joy, you can spend a lot of time on YouTube looking at what he did.”
That Toni Erdmann took five years to make, from conception to release, is down to several reasons, one being that Ade had two sons in that period. While writing the script she was pregnant with one and when the film went into post-production she was pregnant with the other. “I became a mother,” she said after her first child, “which is also like making one film, at least. A very nice, private film.”
The filming for Toni Erdmann was arduous, with Ade sometimes doing 30 or more takes of a scene and ending up with 100 hours of footage. Before that, a lengthy casting process involved not just choosing the right Ines and the right Winfried, but trying lots of actors in different combinations before landing on the dream duo of Hüller and Viennese stage actor Peter Simonischek. Neither, Ade says, is much like their character in real life. “Sandra is very emotional, so she always said that it was really tiring to play this tough, cool, hard person. I think that’s interesting, when there’s automatically a conflict.” Hüller is best known to cinephiles for her extraordinary performance in 2006 German drama Requiem, as an epileptic student whose religious fanatic parents have her exorcised.
Writing Toni Erdmann came out of Ade’s research into corporate behaviour. She became fascinated by the role of consultant, discovering that firms often hire them to advise on difficult choices, so bosses have someone to blame for unpopular decisions. At heart, Toni Erdmann is a powerful political film, not least as a study of how the cold intricacies of managerial language systemically alienate individuals from their instincts. Ade says it is “about globalisation and capitalism and what they do with us, with our relationships”. But, she adds: “It doesn’t give one strong political statement. Two days ago I was at a symposium and [Iranian director] Asghar Farhadi said, ‘The time of cinema that gives answers is over – now’s the time for cinema that asks questions.’ I was like, ‘Oh shit, where’s my notebook? I have to write that down!’”
While German cinema continues to have a low profile on the international circuit, Ade belongs to a generation of adventurous independent directors who have been quietly making a reputation over the past two decades. She is often listed as a member of the so-called new Berlin school, but like most of its supposed alumni, discounts its existence as a movement per se: “Everybody really makes very different things.” The peers she feels most in common with, she says, include her sometime collaborator Valeska Grisebach, director of a compellingly downbeat love story called Longing. “Ulrich Köhler’s films I like a lot,” Ade says – he directed acclaimed 2011 drama Sleeping Sickness – then adds: “He’s my husband, but that’s not the thing about that.” She mentions other women directors she rates in Germany (Pia Marais, Nicolette Krebitz) and Austria (Jessica Hausner): “They all have a very strong personal handwriting.”
While visiting Hollywood, Ade has inevitably been asked whether she would contemplate an American remake of Toni Erdmann. “You’d have to take out an hour!” she laughs. More to the point, have the studios been courting her? No, no offers yet – and besides: “I’m afraid that here it’s very, very far away from the way I’m working. I’m in such a luxury position in Europe and I’m lucky to be my own producer. I have so many freedoms that I think it would be really complicated to give them up – and for what reason? I really like writing and I need to know about what I write.”
Does Ade think her next film will take another five years? “I think five years at least. You know, I really worked five years almost every day on that film. I participate in every step and that takes a lot of time; that’s why it also becomes very exhausting.”
It’s time to break off. Ade must get ready to fly home to Berlin, to whatever long-term project she’s planning next, and to her complicated babysitting arrangements and her two sons, aged one and five. And it sounds as though she’ll need time to pack everything from last night’s Globes goodie bag.
“There are funny things inside, like a mini-fan that you can put on top of your iPhone, a lot of crap. When you go to the rest rooms, there is all this stuff lying around that you can grab – makeup, chocolate, all that capitalistic trash! You get it at every festival – I think it’s the last time that I will touch that. At these events, there are all these films about the problems the world has, about people suffering in different ways – and then all these contrasts.
“Sometimes it gets me,” she says. “But sometimes I have fun.”
Toni Erdmann is released on 3 February
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