Conclusion: German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism

Abstract

In a key scene toward the end of Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016), Ines (Sandra Hüller), a management consultant in Bucharest, hosts a brunch party to celebrate her birthday. An exemplary neoliberal subject, Ines knows only work and the constant quest for self-optimization; accordingly, her birthday brunch has been organized as a team-building event for her management group, whose mission to modernize a Romanian oil company through the massive outsourcing of jobs has caused strife among her colleagues. However, when the doorbell rings just as she is struggling with a wardrobe malfunction, Ines answers the door naked, and spontaneously decides only to admit guests to the party who agree to shed their clothes as well. Initially repelled by the naked party, several of her colleagues surmise that it must be part of the team-building exercise and awkwardly stand around Ines’s living room sipping wine in the nude. Toni Erdmann chronicles the attempts of Ines’s father Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a retired music teacher with a penchant for practical jokes, to puncture the glossy façade of Ines’s life, which, as he suspects, belies her insecurity, obstructed agency, and ultimate emptiness. He does this by adopting an array of wigs, prostheses, masks, and personae—notably that of the ‘life coach’ Toni Erdmann—that call attention to the performance of the self enacted by Ines and her business-world colleagues, a mode of self-fashioning whose ostensibly blank style makes it otherwise illegible as performance. At the naked brunch, Winfried arrives in his most extravagant get-up yet: clothed as a Kukeri, he wears a traditional Bulgarian costume designed to ward away evil spirits that consists of a full-body suit covered in long, dark hair, replete with a massive mask decorated in bright pompoms. His strange and troubling presence at the party, where no one can determine his identity beneath the hairy mask, further disturbs the already immensely uncomfortable guests. Awkward, unsettling, and hilarious, this scene employs slapstick comedy and visual jokes to generate an affective response among viewers that conjoins laughter with discomfort. Like Toni Erdmann as a whole, the naked brunch scene makes visible the illusion of