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.

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

Vlad Ivanov, Anamaria Marinca, and Laura Vasiliu in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

Otilia: Anamaria Marinca
Gabita: Laura Vasiliu
Mr. Bebe: Vlad Ivanov
Adi: Alexandru Potocean
Adi's Mother: Luminita Gheorghiu
Adi's Father: Adi Carauleanu

Director: Cristian Mungiu
Screenplay: Cristian Mungiu
Cinematography: Oleg Mutu

A harrowing, brilliant film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is set in 1987 Romania, during the final years of the Ceausescu regime. Gabita, a student, wants an abortion, illegal in Romania, so she prevails on her roommate in a university dormitory, Otilia, to help her. But Gabita is so deeply sunk in denial that she's incapable of doing much more than ask for help: It's up to Otilia to do most of the planning and strategy after Gabita has telephoned the abortionist, a Mr. Bebe, to make the initial arrangements. Otilia even borrows money from her boyfriend, Adi, to help Gabita, and when the day arrives, she has been persuaded by Gabita to meet with Bebe and to go to the hotel room Gabita has supposedly reserved. Otilia has to bear the brunt of Bebe's scorn and bullying when he finds he is dealing with an intermediary. The hotel has no record of Gabita's reservation, and Otilia is forced to find a room in another hotel, every time encountering resistance and hostility, plus additional charges, from the hotels. Director Cristian Mungiu, who also wrote the screenplay, finds a tone halfway between Dickens and Kafka in his portrayal of bureaucratic indifference. Moreover, when Gabita finally arrives for the abortion, having characteristically forgotten the plastic sheet she was supposed to bring, we find that her capacity for denial extends to how far advanced her pregnancy really is: She had told Otilia that it has been three months since her period, but Bebe forces her to admit that it has been almost five -- hence the film's title. He demands more money, and when the women are unable to come up with it, he agrees to proceed if they will have sex with him. Mungiu uses long takes, carefully framed without camera movement or cuts, to set up this sordid tale, and the performances by Marinca, Vasilu, and Ivanov are equal to the demands of what amounts almost to filmed theater. After Bebe has performed the procedure and left, while Gabita is waiting to expel the fetus, Otilia leaves for a while, having agreed to attend a birthday dinner for Adi's mother. Once again, Mungiu uses a long take at the dinner table, where the guests, friends of Adi's parents, chatter on inconsequentially as Otilia sits there virtually silent, though obviously anxious about Gabita's plight, as well as feeling guilty about having sex with Bebe. It's to Mungiu's great credit -- not to mention Marinca's -- that he does nothing to communicate this subtext to the scene, other than allow the banality of the dinner table talk to make us focus on Marinca's face and to project our own uneasiness about the situation onto her. Mungiu also contrasts his long, still takes with long tracking shots filmed with a handheld camera as, later, Otilia hurries through the nighttime streets looking for a place to dispose of the fetus. It's undeniably an unpleasant story, but it's also a haunting one, given great resonance by the skillful characterization of the script and its performers and the superb cinematic technique of its director. In the recent BBC poll of film critics to name the best film of the 21st century, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days came in at No. 15. I might have placed it higher.