Why a 162-Minute-Long German Comedy is The Best Film of 2016

The best film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival was a two-and-a-half-hour-long German comedy. Yes, you read correctly: a meter-long bratwurst of a film that might just be the funniest thing to come out of Germany since before World War Two. The film is Toni Erdmann, the third feature film by director Maren Ade. Six months after Cannes, Toni Erdmann has also emerged as the best film of 2016.

Despite the running time, not a single second of Toni Erdmann is wasted. Ade constructs the film in long takes, often hand-held with no background music. A deadpan exercise in excruciating discomfort, the film follows a father with a penchant for practical jokes (the great Austrian actor Peter Simonischek, a former Everyman at the Salzburg Festival) who pays an unwelcome visit on his workaholic daughter (the equally impressive Sandra Hüller) in Bucharest as she is trying to close an important oil deal. In the modernizing Romanian capital, the film becomes a series of increasingly strained encounters between father and daughter. Whoopee cushions are detonated, prosthetic teeth and shabby wigs are donned, the keys to handcuff inconveniently go missing and the projectile potential of spaghetti is explored. Until it culminates in a series of madcap crescendos: a go-for-broke rendition of the Whitney Houston anthem “Greatest Love Of All,” a nude birthday party and an unexpectedly moving and furry father-daughter reconciliation in a public park.

Ade’s previous film, Everyone Else (2008) was a tragi-comic observation of a disintegrating relationship set amid the lush backdrop of Sardinia. That film earned Ade a Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin Film Festival and it has been seven years since. Watching Toni Erdmann, one feels certain that the screenplay went through countless drafts before reaching such a state of perfection.

Toni Erdmann is on the Academy's shortlist for Best Foreign Film, having already won the five top prizes at the European Film Awards last month and being nominated for the Golden Globe. The only explanation for why it walked away from Cannes empty handed is that the serious-minded jurors failed to consider a mere comedy an important film. The Fipresci Critics Jury thought differently and awarded Toni Erdmann top prize, which showed that they understood something the International Jury did not. At 35, Ade was one of the youngest directors in the main competition. By selecting her film, Fipresci cast their vote for the future of filmmaking. If that’s not important, I don’t know what is.

9 other noteworthy films of 2016 (in no particular order): Fuocoammare (Rosi), Paterson (Jarmusch), I, Daniel Blake (Loach), Things to Come (Hansen-Løve), The Salesman (Farhadi), Scarred Hearts (Jude), The Woman Who Left (Diaz), A Quiet Passion (Davies), News from Planet Mars (Moll)

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