Week #9 2020: Toni Erdmann
Work is not given enough time in art. Putting aside sleeping hours, most people spend more time in work than outside of it, yet there are very few films, books or visual art about the experience of the very common experience of corporate office work. There’s some logic to that: work is ‘other thing’ from which art can be a compensation and a leavener. We also offer artists – like court jesters – the space to be unshackled, to be free where we cannot. It’s part of why people at the top of the corporate ladder use their wealth to buy chunks of that freedom as artwork. When work does show up in art, it’s something to be avoided, to escape into Walter Mitty fantasy. The immense popularity of the different iterations of The Office (Netflix’s most streamed show) speak to how eager we are to see this common experience represented, and how scarce it is otherwise.
It’s not even like there’s a lack of material, if artists cared to look for it. The office is a space of strange intimacy. Look at the company leaving do, the point at which bubbling emotions blow the pot. I’ve had colleagues press my hand and hug me firmly, looking for reassurance that we can still be good friends even after we’re no longer sharing stationery. My deepest friendships from the last ten years are almost all from people I’ve worked with. The slow reveal of someone’s character that an office provides is a great opportunity to understand others: their generosity, their fragility, their enthusiasms and irritations. One of the most beautiful, unexpected but totally apt moments in Mad Men comes when Peggy and Stan – long time antagonists, yet still calling each other during long work nights, just to be reassured there’s someone else there – realise in the show’s final moments they are in love. Work gives us space to show the kind of low-level care (both as prescribed by our job descriptions and well outside of them) that’s the heart of lasting love.
I first saw Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016) – perhaps the greatest film about modern work – at the perfect time in my working life. I’d spent six years as an editor in the self-help industry, at the UK wing of the world’s largest propagators of the gospel of Green Goddess juice, chakra clearing and gong baths. Founded by a woman who didn’t start writing until her sixties and ended up with one of the top one hundred bestsellers of all time, it was always a weird source of pride that Todd Haynes was moved to write personal favourite Safe because of how much he disliked our founders pseudo-scientific lies about AIDS. It was a strange combination of the crunchy corporate Californian and the remnants of British publishing as rich man’s pastime, and we peddled things I found either baffling or dangerous, but it is still the kindest place I’ve ever worked. While there, I spent my free time getting a master’s in film history, putting on film screenings, taking an internship at a dreadful, now-defunct film distributor, all certain in the knowledge that film was my avocation, not my profession. And yet, by equal parts good luck, privilege and hard work, by the time Toni Erdmann came out, I was deep enough in the film industry to be annoyed it hadn’t been playing Cannes while I was there.
Toni Erdmann is about the relationship between corporate consultant Ines (Sandra Hüller, and where is her starring role in everything?) and her father Winfried (Peter Simonischek). She is in Bucharest, grasping the nettle of outsourcing for an oil company unwilling to take responsibility for its economic cruelties. Winfried, unable to connect with his daughter and nursing sadness of his own, turns up to disrupt her life, posing as corporate life coach Toni Erdmann. As Erdmann, he dons buck teeth, iridescent suit and cheap, lank wig and shows up everywhere he’s unwanted, a Groucho Marx moustache on a LinkedIn profile. The film often feels visually like it is a play upon corporate stock photography, but with a poo emoji hidden behind the multiracial group get the job done with the power of team work.
Toni Erdmann could easily be your classic screwball story: a chaotic lifeforce dances into the life of someone who needs unblocking, and seduces them into realising the value of fun. But it’s infinitely more complex than that, partly because the film gives work as a subject the importance it deserves. It’s a film not just about dismantling someone’s pretences and protections, but understanding why we need them. It’s an exchange of understanding of the complexity of each other’s lives, between a father who doesn’t understand his daughter, the corporate animal, and a daughter who doesn’t understand her father, who dresses up as a gigantic furry beast to get her attention.
What they share is being fantasists. Winfried’s are more obvious, of course. In the film’s first scene, he answers the door to the delivery man in scuba mask and blood pressure monitor, pretending to be a recently released mail bomber. It’s a rejection of the rationalised world enforced by the courier’s scanner gun, quantising human interaction to its own logic. But it’s also for Winfried to hide from his own mortality, to pretend his rising blood pressure is a farce.
Toni Erdmann’s genius is in revealing the ways that corporate life relies on the same kinds of masquerades. Indeed, Ines’s client pushes her into an even more elaborate role play. He wants to outsource, but always denies it, asking her to be the face of this decision that she has no strong feelings about (that she has been brought to a place where making dozens of people jobless stirs no strong feelings is its own kind of absurdity). Ines is sleeping with her colleague Gerald, but in the office they have only contempt for each other; she must put up with a thousand sexist microaggressions, simultaneously acknowledging them and laughing them off in the next moment. All of these are compromises we accept on a daily basis; professionalism as performance. Finally, when Ines’s friends court Erdmann, believing him to be the corporate coach for a big fish corporate player, it reveals the way kindness becomes its own bizarre play. We have to ignore the buck teeth and laugh along, in case they’re the property of someone important.
After the first hour of the film, when she rejoins her consultancy colleagues to present to their client, we’re reminded of why we are motivated to carry on in these kinds of environments: the thrill of achievement, the in-jokes, the blackly comic camaraderie and the feeling of using all of your skills to solve a problem. Her boss compliments her: ‘Ines, you’re an animal.’ Under the striplights in a room filled with MDF furniture, it’s a laughable comparison. But we also sympathise with the consolations of this life. It’s easy to understand why Ines has adopted corporate sobriety in the face of Winfried’s typical baby boomer, flower child extended adolescence (and in turn, the very short scenes with his cruel mother help us see why he in turn has taken to the whoopee cushion). As they attend an ambassador’s reception, Winfried immediately dons his false teeth as a shield against the rhetorical banalities. It takes only a short, scolding look from Ines to read a lifetime of having to parent your own parent.
But Ines is running up against the limits of her coping strategy. Asked by her client’s wife to recommend somewhere to shop in Bucharest, she has no sense of the life of the city she has called home for more than a year. Living for her next promotion and transfer in Shanghai, she exists in the present as though it were happening to someone else. She outsources free living to a cravat-wearing life coach she speaks to via Skype (one thing you learn selling foreign rights in self-help publishing: Germans are MAD for spirituality, the more baroque the system, the better).
To its credit, Toni Erdmann is not a film about throwing away these fantasies, but about choosing one that at least pleases you. Fantasists they both are, but only Erdmann/Winfried is enjoying himself. The film keeps the logic of why we need fantasy close at hand, by bookending with two deaths (first of Winfried’s beloved dog, and then of his less-than-beloved mother). We must fill the void in whatever way we can. They meet at the point where the confluence of a few minor events (the death of a dog, a piano student quitting, a promotion denied) make clear how precarious the illusions we live on are. The course of the film is a route to new coping strategies, new minor compensations for major gaps in our lives.
But the route to them is not about one character showing the other the truth of The Good Life. They both exchange value systems, make the attempt to see each other as they really are. The best jokes are ones that demonstrate connection, an awareness of how the humour will land with the audience. We’ve all been in that situation when someone – a landlord, a teacher – tells jokes you know are as worn and flat as the beer pump or blackboard. At the start of the film, Winfried’s jokes with Ines are just like this. They could be for the courier just as much as her. There’s a leitmotif in the film of giving unwanted gifts that extends all the way from his bizarre gift of a cheesegrater to the huge mall gifted to Romanians by market logic (“It's the biggest mall in Europe and no one can afford anything in it.”).
Slowly, over the course of the film, they begin to play with each other’s approach to life, to create in jokes, even if the other is not there to appreciate it. Winfried comforts her as though they are in a performance review (‘You’re doing everything just great’) and she begins to adopt his jester-like skew on life’s pieties. In a hotel room tryst with Gerald, she encourages him to ejaculate across room service petit fours. Ines’s story is of someone returning to their body, to truly becoming an animal. And so, the film’s climax comes with Ines naked at her birthday party, embracing her father in a Bulgarian folk costume made to dispel bad spirits and welcome the spring, feeling touch as though for the first time. Toni Erdmann is studded with honking moments of revelation like this, yet they’re justified by the space around them (it’s the best part of three hours long) and the commitment to the characters before they can arrive at them. It performs the magic trick of letting us imagine a world where even Whitney Houston’s ‘The Greatest Love of All’ could be felt without a drop of cynicism.
Ultimately, we cannot be the person our parents want us to be, or bridge the gap of caring for our child as they truly want to be cared for. But there is connection in making the attempt, in love gauged not by always doing the right thing but in being willing to try for others. The film’s final shots are of Ines, a new job at a new company in Shanghai in her future, waiting for Winfried to take her photo, awkwardly removing Toni Erdmann’s teeth and her grandmother’s ugly hat. Neither fit, but she’ll pose for the photo anyway.
Recommendations this week
This very nice one shot video for Billy Bragg’s ‘Levi Stubb’s Tears’.
John Cage doing ‘Water Walk’ on game show I’ve Got a Secret in 1960. The laughter pushes this way outside of the avant garde exercise.
One of a thousand strands you could follow in Toni Erdmann’s dense lightness is Romania’s post-Communist fortunes. One of the minor characters in the film is Dascalu – representing the oil deals from the Romanian side – played by Alexandru Papadopol. There’s a nice straight line from the character he plays in Christi Puiu’s fantastic Stuff & Dough, a low level hustler looking to do a small illegal job in order to wash himself clean and buy his own store. It’s entirely believable in the economic ‘progress’ of Romania that he’d become the management consultant type in the proceeding fifteen years. Well worth a watch.