Quote:
RATNER: Two small scenes that echo each other particularly struck me: the death of the dog Willi and Winfried’s apparent departure from Bucharest. There is a way that Winfried slumps against the tree after Willi’s death, silent and defeated, that echoes when he is preparing to get in the taxi to the airport and leave. And the way Ines watches from her balcony is so poignant: she is able to let down her defenses and cry once her father cannot see her.
ADE:I always had in mind that this film in about saying good-bye and of course that includes death. That’s why the dog dies. When the grandmother dies in the end, Winfried is now the next generation to go, and then Ines will be alone.
Film blog 1
The interviewer describes two scenes, Winfried's behavior after the dog's death and Ines' crying as he sees his father leave. Ade's response sums up the film's topic as farewell and death. Both the death of the dog and of the grandmother serve this topic. In her answer, generation is used as a keyword to focus on the social issues of intergenerational conflict and death. The dog Willi serves as a clue to connect three generations, showing the disconnection between the father and the grandmother, and between the daughter and the father. Winfried's suffering after the death of the dog Willi is mentioned by the interviewer.
Without the distraction of comedic elements, Winfried's quiet frustration is portrayed in a straightforward manner. In the relationship between father and daughter, the importance of the dog to Winfried is acknowledged by Ines. Ines, who is meeting with two work friends at the bar of a fancy restaurant, complains about her father, explaining that he went through a crisis due to the death of his dog, and that he came to visit her for that reason alone.
Although she may have had many other reasons to be upset about her father's sudden appearance, from her perspective, her father, a man who often ignored her wishes, had turned his daughter into a dog substitute (Glasenapp, 2019). While talking about the dog, the so-called character "Toni Erdmann" appears. As he undermines the norms of the new economy through his carnival-like performance as Toni Erdmann, he is perhaps trying to challenge Ines' highly structured and serious life to examine the emptiness that pervades her life (Glasenapp, 2019). Ines' generation has lost its moral compass, sense of the common good, and collective sense of belonging (Brody, 2016).His adult daughter alienated herself from him and embarked on an independent career path, treating him as a negative foil, seemingly motivated by a completely internalized refusal to be like him. Indeed, Winfried's status as an elderly divorcee may be due to the fact that, in someway, he does not want to end up like his mother. In terms of grandmother's relationship with him, for Winfried's generation, their memorialization and moral work seems to have cleared up their parents' failures (Brody, 2016). At the beginning of the film, the grandmother asks Winfried why she did not resort to euthanasia to reduce the suffering of the dog Willi.
And Winfried uses an almost forceful rebuttal to his mother's argument.
In this way, the topic of euthanasia is introduced with a moderate amount of dark humor, which in the film can be linked to the Nazi regime and its practice of euthanasia through the presence of the steel helmet stored in basement (Glasenapp, 2019).
She also listens to Harry Belafonte, although it is "black music”.
Ines' grandmother's generation, whose casual racism and nostalgia for militarism is eventually revealed (Brody, 2016). In the end, at the grandmother's funeral, father and daughter do not clearly agree on one thing. The answer to how the generations would get along with each other is not explicitly stated.
Reference:
Ade, M. (Producer), & Ade, M. (Director) (2016).Toni Erdmann[Motion picture]. German:
Komplizen Film.
Ade, M. (2017).TONI ERDMANN, FAUXPA: interview with Maren Ade/ interviewer: Ratner,
M. [Interview transcript] Film Quarterly (Vol. 70),University of California Press.
Brody, R. (2016). A Stilted Vision of a Declining Europe in "Toni Erdmann". The New Yorker, available at:
Glasenapp, J. (2019). Mixed Feelings: The Tragicomedy of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann. New German Critique,46(3), pp. 35-51.
