TIFF 2016 began for me this evening with Maren Ade's "Toni Erdmann", a film about the reunion and emotional collision between a driven German management consultant and her slightly anarchistic father.
It's a comedy founded mostly on the discomfort of the relationship between the two and the impact, mostly on the daughter, of that relationship. Although parts of it are quite funny, overall I don't think it worked very well. It required a suspension of disbelief around the ease with which her father is able to insinuate himself in her life, even in the foreign city of Bucharest, where she is working to develop a plan to outsource the maintenance of oil rigs in the area which I was not able to provide. I also found that it didn't establish the relationship very well between the two, so the emotional payoff later on just doesn't have the strength that it needs.
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