Toni Erdmann (2016)

Toni Erdmann arrives trailing a canon behind it: Sight & Sound's best film of 2016, the top spot in Cahiers du cinéma, a Palme d'Or competitor that left Cannes with the FIPRESCI prize and a great deal of critical hysteria. The film itself is simpler and stranger than that. A divorced music teacher with a pair of joke teeth and a talent for uninvited impersonation follows his business-consultant daughter to Bucharest, where she is busy facilitating an outsourcing project in the oil industry and appears to have misplaced her capacity for joy. He becomes Toni Erdmann, life coach, and proceeds to haunt her professional life like a benign poltergeist.

The corporate material supplies the texture. Ade finds the consultancy world hollow, its receptions, presentations and team-building rituals drained of meaning, and the post-communist Bucharest backdrop adds a faint suggestion of Western capital rearranging a country's furniture. The critique is humanist and rueful, not a manifesto. Ines is a woman navigating a boardroom of men who talk over her, and she was written and directed by a woman, though the film resolves this through character and embarrassment instead of argument. The infamous naked birthday brunch lands as existential comedy, a woman shedding pretense along with her dress, and it carries no broader statement about bodies.

Elsewhere the inventory comes up nearly empty, and this is to the film's credit. There is no queer thread, no environmental brief, no attempt to read eccentricity as diagnosis, no rewriting of the historical record. Ade observes and provokes. She does not sermonize. The result is a comedy of exhaustion that trusts an audience to draw its own conclusions, which in the current era of cinema-as-briefing feels almost reckless.