Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/03/17

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, November 3, 2017

Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in Toni Erdmann

Ines Conradi: Sandra Hüller
Winfried Conradi: Peter Simonischek
Henneberg: Michael Wittenborn
Gerald: Thomas Loibl
Tim: Trystan Pütter
Anca: Ingrid Bisu
Steph: Lucy Russell
Tatjana: Hadewych Minis
Ilescu: Vlad Ivanov
Flavia: Victoria Cocias

Director: Maren Ade
Screenplay: Maren Ade
Cinematography: Patrick Orth

The nearly three hours -- well, two hours, 42 minutes -- of Toni Erdmann don't exactly fly by. It's more that they sometimes pause while we accustom ourselves to the eccentricity of the characters and begin to absorb some of the satire, build up another head of steam, and speed into another head-spinning but frequently funny episode. There's a feeling of improv about the film, and with improv there are often dead spots between outbursts of brilliance. The film is about a father and daughter, Winfried and Ines Conradi. He's a shaggy old prankster who teaches music in a school; she's an intensely driven corporate consultant now working to land a contract in Romania that would help companies streamline -- but mostly by jettisoning their unionized work force. The film is thus a satire on global corporate capitalism, with side glances at the pervasive sexism in that world. But writer-director Maren Ade has chosen not to weight the film in the direction of either character study or satire, and I think the film suffers from tone problems occasionally. Granted, it would be easy to slip into formula with such mismatched characters, and I say this knowing that an American remake with Jack Nicholson and Kristen Wiig is in the works, both of whom are more than capable of doing the conventional if satisfyingly funny thing with the setup: a father who delights in comic disguises like fright wigs and false teeth to shake up his uptight daughter's aggressively workaholic ways. It's to the credit of the film that there are enough unexpected moments -- such as Ines's singing "The Greatest Love of All" at a Romanian family's Easter celebration that Winfried has crashed -- that it never sinks to the routine and conventional. Finally, the film does, I think, go too far, when Ines suddenly decides to host a corporate party in the nude, insisting that all the guests strip too, and claims that it's a "team-building" exercise. Winfried, of course, crashes this party as well, wearing a Bulgarian kukeri costume -- it almost literally turns the film into a shaggy-dog story. Toni Erdmann was a big critical hit, and was a major contender for the foreign film Oscar that went, I think correctly, to Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman.