“Toni Erdmann” My father, this ball – L’Obs

Music teacher with little students, Winfried is useless, if not to make jokes factor to watch over his mother and his old dog, one and the other evil shape. For her family, it is embarrassing. In the eyes of Ines, his only daughter, triumphant representative of modern Western societies, it is very likely already dead.

To his confusion, Ines, senior executive based in Bucharest responsible for establishing restructuring plans (how fired the most employees to put more full excavation), soon understands that he is not yet buried: the day after a family party that allowed them to find a once again they had nothing in common, she sees invite in his life without warning.

wig and false teeth

This is a new and very predictable fiasco, but the cumbersome father will not let the matter: sporting a wig and false teeth, he invents Toni Erdmann, grotesque character tumbles in every turn red cloth waved before the white Ines , whoopee cushion placed under her buttocks executive woman ready to swallow everything to the little oven on which her lover has masturbated in advance.

So yes it’s funny, and it is an event: a German comedy that does not make laugh that the Germans had not seen it since Lubitsch, ie not from a straw (it applied the film no has nothing in common with those of the Berlin master, no offense to some kind pranksters made their Cannes vapors climb the coconut hasty comparisons).

“Toni Erdmann,” the Palme laughter

the strings pulled by the writer, producer and director are those of the vaudeville genre whose effectiveness is not questionable when it is served with judgment and grace of two virtuoso performers: Peter blood Simonischek and Sandra Hüller, whose complexion, in agreement with the surgical thought his character, led to doubt the nature of the fluid that flows in the veins of Ines.

as she says herself, Ines will bear nothing of these events if she was a feminist, and probably would not accept his professional mission if it had preserved in her a gram of humanity. This humanity that his father wakes jester in it, that’s a good argument to own seduce any moral it is.

So, we hardly dare suggest that mounted more aggressively, the film No would not have been less convincing.

Pascal Mérigeau

♥♥♥ “Toni Erdmann” by Maren Ade. German comedy with Peter Simonischek, Sandra Hüller, Michael Wittenborn (2:42).