The glorious peculiarity of the German comedy “Toni Erdmann” resists easy categorization, and you can’t really tell what’s up, or why you should see it, judging from the coming-attractions trailer put out by its domestic distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. SPC boasts some of the savviest stewards in international film, and even they can’t figure out how to sell this movie.
Category: Romania
FILM: Business as Usual
HENRY JAMES ‘S DESCRIPTION of certain doorstop-sized nineteenth-century novels – the “large, loose, baggy monster” – applies pretty well to Maren Ade ‘s Toni Erdmann , a downbeat comic study of a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship that comes in a bit short of the three-hour mark, and which has as its keystone gag an actual large, loose, baggy monster. Ines is a thirtysomething German professional adrift in professional stasis despite her monomaniacal focus on climbing the corporate ladder at the backwater Romanian branch of a consultancy firm.
FILM: Business as Usual
HENRY JAMES ‘S DESCRIPTION of certain doorstop-sized nineteenth-century novels – the “large, loose, baggy monster” – applies pretty well to Maren Ade ‘s Toni Erdmann , a downbeat comic study of a dysfunctional father-daughter relationship that comes in a bit short of the three-hour mark, and which has as its keystone gag an actual large, loose, baggy monster. Ines is a thirtysomething German professional adrift in professional stasis despite her monomaniacal focus on climbing the corporate ladder at the backwater Romanian branch of a consultancy firm.