A s of Monday, the 69th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is almost exactly at midpoint, and already the pileup of terrific—or even flawed but fascinating—films is astonishing. If the first five or so days is any indication, this may be the strongest competition lineup in years. Winifred is a long- divorced and extremely rumpled music teacher living somewhere in provincial Germany, with an ancient and very tired dog as his only companion.
Or so she thinks. Toni Erdmann is a comedy mostly that runs for nearly three hours. What sane person makes a two-hour-andminute comedy?
But Ade—who won the Silver Bear in Berlin in for her romantic drama Everyone Else —is in control every instant, and the minutes fly by.
The picture has been picked up for distribution by Sony Pictures Classics. His antics wear her out at first, and then they wear her down. Eventually, accord is reached in the quietest and most believable way possible—it sneaks up on the characters, and on us.
In the course of this strange and marvelous father-daughter cat-and-mouse game, Ade spins out dozens of luminous, shimmering ideas that speak to the way most of us live, and might even challenge us to rethink how we see our parents and our children. How far, really, does the apple ever fall from the tree? Are the flaws we see in our parents sometimes really a kind of strength? In a world that never slows down, let alone stop, how do we keep our work from sapping our lifeblood?
