What a hunk!

It’s strange to revisit some of the Oscar bait from 2017 now. You see, there’s so many films that had passed me by during January and February, including La La Land, sorry, Moonlight (ha ha, joke which will already be dated!) and Fences. But this one was so special that I had to come back to remark on it. Toni Erdmann which was one of the “Best Foreign Language” nominees. It lost out to “The Salesman”, the Iranian entry of which got shown in London instead of Asghar Farhadi, the writer and director going to the US to attend the Oscars. You know, because of Trump’s first attempt at a not-a-Muslim-ban-honest-guv.

As it’s a European film, it’s going to be an acquired taste as some jokes are good and some situations you could only ever see in an European film. So basically strap in, and hope that you come out the other side intact.
We begin the film with Peter Simonischek as Winfried Conradi. He lives in a leafy part of Germany and has an old lady as a neighbour with a dog.

He was a music teacher with a warped sense of humour as you will see for yourself. There’s a birthday party for his daughter, Ines (Sandra Hüller) and things are rather awkward. You see, Winfried’s long suffering, unhappy / sexually weird daughter is busy trying to work her way up in a large company and pretty much as you imagine (or indeed experience every day in real life), she doesn’t really have a life.

So Winfried buggers off to Bucharest at a moment’s notice to pretty much harass his daughter by turning up at her place of work, being a bit silly in a very weird but well intentioned way. Along the way, he goes with Ines to a reception at the US embassy where her boss pretty much ignores Ines, who seems to be very desperate for attention. Come on, play hard to get! A couple of other events where Ines gets pooped on, and next thing we know, Winfried turns up as Toni Erdmann at a bar, with a crap wig and even worse teeth. What’s even more ridiculous is Ines goes along with the charade, even as her dad turns up at various other parties.

You may have taken acid while watching this film…..

This film is certainly different, I have to give it that. For starters, it straggles between German and English for large parts of the film. So a bonus is that your eyes will get a rest every so often from looking at Subtitles. There are a good couple of highlights which will be stuck in your memory after seeing this weirdness.

Two of which will never leave me is the rendition of a Whitney Houston song by Ines and Toni at a random Romanian family’s flat during Easter celebrations and then the other one, well, the image above will pretty much give the game away on that. Believe it or not, everyone ends up getting naked at what was supposed to be a “team building birthday party”. Why? Because Ines gave up on trying to get into a dress and just thought “F**k it!” For the record though, Ingrid Bisu, who plays Ines’ assistant Anca, is pretty hot in the nude.

Actually the last one is something which happens when Ines goes to a co-worker’s hotel room where they normally have naughty, and she asks her man toy to wank onto some food. Which she then eats. Yep. That happened.

So overall, what’s the best way to talk about this movie in which we pretty much come to the conclusion that chasing success at the cost of having a life, is not worth it. Well the acting is alright, there are some laughs to be had, even if it’s not in the way originally intended perhaps. I get the feeling that it was supposed to be more of a drama than a comedy at times. The problem can arise when you’re entirely sure what’s going on, as things seem to happen because….well, they just do. The struggles of modern life are numerous and it’s hard to not see some parallels with what Ines goes through, to what you would go through. The naked party though, that’s probably maybe less of an occurrence. Perhaps.

So is it worth getting down and funky with Toni Erdmann? Only on catch-up streaming services I have to say. It was certainly memorable for different reasons and I’d maybe watch it again. Just I subjectively can’t say it was worth a cinema ticket price.