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It was considered a critics' favourite at the 66th Cannes International Film Festival, received a standing ovation when it was mentioned during the Palme d'Or award ceremony and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars 2017, but didn't receive a prize. Regrettable. Because "Toni Erdmann" by German director Maren Ade really deserved one of the most important awards in international film.

The story of the retired music teacher Winfried, an old-68 who confronts his environment again and again with partly absurd but always endearing and thoroughly charming jokes, and his daughter Ines, who tries to make her mark in the cold business world as a management consultant, is a work in which multi-faceted character development, intelligent comedy and an authentic film language and narrative blend into a convincing whole. The core theme of "Toni Erdmann" is the constant rapprochement between Winfried and Ines, which is full of ups and downs and each of them is amusing, but also touching and sometimes even irritating, for example when Winfried as Toni virtually forces his daughter to sing a Whitney Houston song in front of strangers, exactly the one she loved to sing with her father as a young girl. This scene is characteristic of the entire film because Maren Ade (as in the rest of the film) easily succeeds in creating an authentic range of emotions within a short time: laughter, astonishment, shame, pity - it's all there.

"Toni Erdmann" is also a treatise on the absurdity of relationships and a rescue mission captured on film. With his alter ego Toni, Winfried tries to show his daughter in a friendly, penetrating way that she is worth more than just her job, in which cold narcissism is the tone. Winfried, or Toni, is virtually a smiling rebel leader. A seeming Don Quixote who amuses his fellow men with his ride against the windmill and thereby confronts them with their weaknesses - above all, of course, his own daughter Ines.

That this father-daughter confrontation works so brilliantly is mainly due to two things: The two main actors Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller play famously. They give their characters an autonomous naturalness, far from artificial characteristics. This is probably the result of a simple but certainly elaborate trick: director Ade shot each scene in two versions: Once as a drama, once as a comedy. This trick was also used by M. Night Shyamalan in "The Visit" and these are the only parallels between the two films. In the editing Ade then put the individual fragments together in such a way that the end result is always amusing, but the humour never degenerates into an end in itself, but always says something about the characters, their situation and feelings. A good joke offers more than just the punch line, Toni Erdmann is very good proof of this.

It should be noted, however, that Maren Ade takes a lot of time and breath to build up her story and then let it flow. At over 160 minutes, her film is anything but diverting, and visually it is mostly very conservative. "Toni Erdmann" is not great, crowd-pleasing (comedy) cinema - but it doesn't want to be.

"Toni Erdmann" is not a film that tries to please everyone. Rather, director Ade implants something in her festival hit that many great comedies as well as dramas have lacked in recent years: an idiosyncrasy. An application of individual characteristics that is neither narrowly shaped nor coldly carried before it like a banner. Despite its rather staid exterior, a fresh and vitalising wind blows through the story, which, by the way, does not shy away from showing its characters naked in all facets of their existence. "Toni Erdmann" is not just a comedy, but also an amusing and at the same time very uncomfortable striptease of the soul, a character study in which we can discover a lot - also about ourselves.