Toni Erdmann

So what’s the point of the two most outrageous scenes in Toni Erdmann? 

In the first, Ines turns a tryst with Tim into her watching him masturbate onto a — green, she specifies — petit-four which she then eats. Finger-licking good. In the second, she decides at the last minute to answer the door naked and require all her friends and work colleagues to strip down if they want to stay for her Sunday birthday brunch. 

First, both her actions are outrageous. That means she’s adopting the manic absurdity of her father, Winfried, a compulsive practical joker who has donned looney wig and fake teeth to pass as her CEO’s life coach, “Toni Erdmann.” Within that liberation she’s stripping off false appearances. The service Ines is trying to sell the Bucharest international is explicitly deception, providing a false front for the company’s inhumane conduct in a merger. 

In the first outrageous scene, a romantic tryst is exposed as not having any romance at all. Ines’s Tim is a junior colleague, excluded from key meetings, an attractive callow young man whom she is sexually using — like a confection. By watching him masturbate she admits her detachment from him even in their normal intercourse. Instead of their usual pretence at “making love” she is literally using him as a delectable to appease her appetite. Her choice of green pastry may be a nod at her eco consciousness — or a reminder that he is that callow junior, green in judgment. 

The second episode has her stripping all the veneers of her corporate image including  the smart dress that is the social equivalent to her business uniform. The dress she is trying to change at the last minute is too tight to serve. Her father’s crazy intervention has revived her own spontaneous spirit — first seen when she responds to his insistence she sing. The too-tight dress reminds her that her professional career, responsibilities, efficiency, pretences, are all restricting her essential impulses and character. The team-building use of her birthday then tests her friends’ and colleagues’ willingness to take her on her own terms. Her nakedness also confronts them with the sexism clearly revealed in her boss and male clients.

So Winfried turns out in fact to be a life coach, if only hers. He is returning his daughter to the free spirit she has suppressed for corporate purposes. He’s reviving her individuality and enjoyment of life. He tries to affect the others he meets as well, like the impoverished worker whose side he takes against the corporate expansion with its murderous layoffs, the worker he tries to save from firing, the family gathering he spikes with song. 

Winfried’s very appearance in Ines' life cracks her efficiency and stability. The distraction puts her off her focus. When she catches her foot on the sofa bed she’s making up for him, the bruise swells up and later spatters her white blouse with blood, just before a presentation. It’s a defloration image, an emblem of her penetration and new consciousness. It sets up the two sexual scenes we’re considering. 

The idea of a two and half-hour German comedy may seem surprising. But the acerbic view of corporate character and strategies and the extremity of the father’s and daughter’s behaviour provide the Brechtian dynamic of social criticism and critical detachment (Verfremdunkseffekt). 

“Erdmann” has two other European forbears: Renoir’s Boudu, a vagrant who disrupts the family and life of the bourgeois bookseller who “saves” him from drowning, and the Czech Josef Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweik whose fumbling and possibly deliberate — or not — incompetence destroys the organizational structures and formalities around him.     

In setting German characters in a Rumanian situation director Ms Maren Ade may be reflecting on her nation’s outreach into the EU. Winfried evokes a German folk figure unleashed upon the international sophisticates — and firmly unabashed. This German will remain proudly Germanic — especially manic — in whatever cosmopolitan situation he finds himself. And he will violate every decorum to return his daughter to her freer potential as well. Significantly, once liberated from her Bucharest posting Ines doesn’t return to Germany but takes her show on the road to Singapore. 
     What will she be in Singapore? That country is even more rigid and constraining than Germany and a further flung outpost for German initiative than the European Union. Will she recover her brisk efficiency there, far enough away from her father, or will she explode its dehumanizing officiousness the way she did Bucharest's?