‘Toni Erdmann’ is a gloriously unpredictable father-daughter comedy

Sandra Huller stars as Ines in “Toni Erdmann,” a film directed by Maren Ade. Contributed by Komplizen Film/Sony Pictures Classics/TNS

Sandra Huller stars as Ines in “Toni Erdmann,” a film directed by Maren Ade. Contributed by Komplizen Film/Sony Pictures Classics/TNS

The glorious peculiarity of the German comedy “Toni Erdmann” resists easy categorization. Sony Pictures Classics boasts some of the savviest stewards in international film, and even they can’t figure out how to sell this movie. What is it? Something about a tightly wound businesswoman and her relentlessly practical-joking father. But what?

I suggest you find out the old-fashioned way and actually see it. Writer-director Maren Ade has created a story, a profoundly complicated relationship and a uniquely bracing black comedy of unusual depth of feeling. “Toni Erdmann” offers a wealth of casual, wickedly funny insights into what makes parents and children, women and men do the things they do under duress.

Plotwise: pretty simple. Returning from Shanghai, business consultant Ines reunites in Germany with her recently retired music teacher father, Winfried. She’s about to scoot off again to Bucharest, Romania, where she advises an oil firm on how best to downsize a few hundred employees.

This father/daughter relationship has been strained for years, maybe forever. Winfried is exasperating, always pulling someone’s leg, popping in a pair of screwy false teeth, plopping a black fright wig on his head. The opening scene of “Toni Erdmann” (the title comes from the name of Winfried’s alter ego) sets up the picture beautifully, as Winfried receives a package at his modest apartment, and calmly informs the delivery man that it probably contains the mail-order bomb ordered by his pretend “brother,” Toni.

Much of the picture takes place in Bucharest, as Winfried takes up Ines on her half-hearted offer to host him there. She reluctantly brings dad to a party at the American Embassy; she’s astonished and somewhat hurt that he proves more socially savvy, in his outlandish fashion, than she. This is a woman not comfortable in her own skin.

The film takes a wild left turn at the halfway point, with an explicit sex scene, cold as ice. Later it’s her fright-wig father who helps Ines reconnect to her better instincts. In the second half of “Toni Erdmann” two major sequences — a karaoke version of “The Greatest Love of All” and a nudist birthday gathering — takes the characters to the brink, and pulls them back just in time. Ines realizes, deep down, she must do something drastic to save herself. And that something is allow her father to be the genial crackpot he was born to be.

Running over 2 1/2 hours and worth every minute, Ade’s film showcases the brilliant whip-crack of an actress, Sandra Huller, as Ines, and the veteran Austrian actor Peter Simonischek, as her father, aka Toni Erdmann. The movie has a lot to say about the endless, free-floating junk women must contend with in a capitalistic patriarchy. At the Cannes Film Festival last year, the jury ignored Ade’s film altogether. But it has found a considerable, gratefully discombobulated audience all around the world, and it deserves one here.

MOVIE REVIEW

“Toni Erdmann”

Grade: A

Starring Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller. Directed by Maren Ade.

Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug use. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 42 minutes.

Bottom line: A film about the endless junk women have to put up with in a capitalistic patriarchy