Though she has kept herself busy producing for Miguel Gomes, among others, in the interim, one hopes a deserved Cannes competition berth earns her latest (a complicated commercial play, it must be admitted) enough international exposure to hasten further projects of her own.In case you’re wondering, “Toni Erdmann” is the name of neither protagonist in the film — until, following a mid-narrative segue into brazenly extended bluff-calling and curiously cathartic roleplay, it kind of is. Maren Ade's unique study of an estranged but mutually depressive father and daughter is a humane, hilarious triumph.There are sides of ourselves — reckless ones, ruthless ones, occasionally hopeless ones — that we never want our parents to see, even, or perhaps especially, in adulthood. Für ihren Spielfilm Toni Erdmann gewann sie den Europäischen Filmpreis 2016 und war u. a. für den Oscar und den Golden Globe nominiert. And so the hidden half-lives of a civilly estranged father and daughter overlap to uproarious and finally devastating effect in “At 162 minutes, this episodic, slow-building study of reluctantly shared depression is baggy, yes, but necessarily so: The film takes precisely as much time as it needs for its muddled, maddeningly human characters, played with extraordinary courage and invention by Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller, to find their way into each other, and so into themselves.
Variety and the Flying V logos are trademarks of Variety Media, LLC. Maren Ade (* 12. Ade lives in Berlin, teaching screenwriting at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg in Ludwigsburg. A writer as skilled and attentive to loaded details as Ade could likely have told a touching, redemptive tale of a harried businesswoman and her befuddled dad resolving their differences and finding common ground in half the running time, but “Toni Erdmann” has many more things racing and sometimes reversing through its mind. When his beloved, elderly mutt finally gives up the ghost, Winfried has even less to build his life around than usual; reconnecting with his only child Ines (Hüller), now a thirtysomething, pantsuit-clad corporate go-getter stationed in Romania, becomes his next project.Trouble is, Ines is less outwardly keen to bridge the gap than her father is, particularly when he turns up unannounced in Bucharest for a surprise weekend visit. The 1985 video for Whitney Houston’s version of “Greatest Love of All” is now – after Houston’s years of alleged abuse in her marriage with Bobby Brown, her drug addictions, her death in a bathtub at age 48 in 2012, and the subsequent 2015 death of her daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown – almost unbearably sad […] Gemeinsam mit Janine Jackowski und Jonas Dornbach leitet sie die Filmproduktionsfirma Komplizen Film. 38 wins & 41 nominations. There were lots of major announcements at DC FanDome 2020.
(A clever, pose-matching cut by editor Heike Parplies takes Winfried from mourning in his garden to idling against the office greenery of Ines’ office lobby, neatly dramatizing a rash impulse in one wordless swoop — even at such extravagant length, the moment-to-moment economy of Ade’s filmmaking frequently impresses.) She’s matched beat for beat in technical bravado and internal insight by Simonischek, a Austrian veteran of stage and TV, who’s unafraid to go big on the clownish aspects of Winfried’s personality, while zeroing in on the very specific, deep-rooted sadness that drives them.Ade, likewise, pulls off grand emotive gestures while grazing across subtler dramatic nuances so casually observed — thanks to Patrick Orth’s determinedly unshowy but rigorously character-fixated camerawork — that they seem almost accidental. © Copyright 2020 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. Hüller has already proven herself, in such vehicles as Hans-Christian Schmid’s “Requiem,” an actress of uncommon intuition and expressive intelligence, though she hasn’t previously been handed a scene quite as soul-testing as the three minutes here that find her raggedly belting an impromptu karaoke rendition of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” with riotous, to-hell-with-it personal conviction — a feat that rightly earned a rare mid-film ovation at the film’s Cannes press screening.
As of 2001 she co-founded, together with Janine Jackowski, a fellow graduate from HFF, the "Komplizen" film company. A deliberate, gradually farcical opening scene introduces Winfried Conradi (Simonischek), a divorced piano teacher aimlessly whiling away his semi-retirement in suburban Germany, as a habitual master of prankish disguise, practising multiple personae on a bewildered postman. At one point, focus is fleetingly pulled from Ines’s inner turmoil as she glances down from the lofty heights of her company tower to a swirl of destitute human activity in a crumbling Bucharest shanty so many floors below.
Father and daughter are far from done, too, as he keeps resurfacing in alternative guises: Most aggravatingly to the fearsomely capable Ines, she finds that she’s taken more seriously in business with a man at her side, even one as sloppily uninformed as her father.In a glorious, risk-it-all final hour, Ade and her actors attain a cleansing yet conflicted sense of emotional release through a series of wild, nervily sustained comedic set pieces that lay the characters bare in more ways than one.
Together with Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach, she also runs the film production company Komplizen Film.