Two Films that Share a Vivid, Deep Understanding of the Oddness of the Human Experience

This year there was a bountiful supply of films that felt genuine, beautiful and true — Hell or High Water, Cameraperson, Arrival, Manchester by the Sea, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, and the list goes on. But amongst all of this richness, the two films that I keep returning to are Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight.

On the surface, they are very different. One is a three-hour German comedy (two words that are rarely put together) and the other is an American drama. But they share a vivid and deep understanding of the awkwardness, suffering and all-around oddness of the human experience.

Moonlight is the story of a boy named Chiron, growing up gay, poor and black in Florida. The film is divided into three chapters that delineate his expanding consciousness. This novelistic framework allows the narrative to unspool with quicksilver fluidity. One story pours into the next, joining together to create an immersive experience. It is a film you can drown in.

In the first section entitled ‘Little,’ Chiron is a skinny kid (played by Alex Hibbert), just coming to understand the ways in which he is different. At school the other boys regularly whip his ass and at home his mother is spiralling into drug addiction. The only source of warmth comes from a local drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend Theresa (Janelle Monáe). When Juan discovers Chiron hiding from bullies in an abandoned apartment, he takes the boy home with him and shows him basic human kindness.

But in this compromised and fallen world, nothing is simple. Juan sells drugs to Chiron’s mother, a fact that the boy comes to understand with a dead-eyed silence that encapsulates not only the injury done and understood, but also the agonizing sense of resignation, and even forgiveness.

The second chapter involves Chiron’s emerging understanding of his own sexuality. In the crucible of high school, where everything is scrutinized with laser-focus, even the slightest hint of difference is a potential disaster. After a sexual encounter with his friend Kevin leads Chiron to a moment of betrayal and violence, the pattern of his life appears set.

Or does it?

When we finally meet the adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes), he is plated with muscle and the gangster accoutrements of a do-rag and gold grills. But the same little kid, desperate for love and warmth, is still visible behind his eyes. A late night phone call prompts a reunion between Chiron and Kevin, and something akin to a miracle occurs.

Director Barry Jenkins took eight years to make Moonlight and it shows. The masterful level of craft in the film is obvious. Everything is given the time and expanse to unfurl at its own pace, nothing feels rushed, and nothing feels extraneous. It is also incredibly beautiful, its fractured narrative captured in kaleidoscopic patterns of jewelled brightness and lustrous darkness. With each turn of history, these fragments fall into new alignments, but keep their sharp and clear meaning.

But most critically, it is one of those rare creatures that gently, almost invisibly, places the viewer inside the story, so that we feel what the people on the screen feel — pain, desire, rage, grief and finally hope — as delicate and fragile as a newborn.

Empathy is a curious thing. It takes you out of yourself and places you inside the experience of another. It assuages the thudding reality of being stuck inside your own head and offers a means of escape. In this aspect, Moonlight is a strangely liquid film. We’re creatures of salt water. Whether in blood or tears or semen, it leaks out of us, wetly, in humble humiliating secretions that remind us of the essential physicality of experience. These naked vulnerable bodies that bumble through the world, bumping into things, are objects of great beauty. The film’s most stunning sequence involves Juan teaching Chiron how to swim, letting him relax into the water, trusting that the ocean will hold him up. For a moment, all boundaries are dissolved and we become this skinny little kid, floating in the sea, free and happy.

It is this ability to transfer consciousness that also takes place in Toni Erdmann. The story is set a world away from the heat and humidity of Moonlight’s Floridian lushness. It is a distinctly grey palette that suffuses Ade’s film. The sky, the people and the landscape all seem shrouded in mist, a visual signifier of the sadness that coats the action.

After the death of his beloved dog, a shaggy old hippie named Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek) decides to visit his daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller) in Bucharest, where she is working for an oil company. In her stilettos and pantsuits, Ines is a portrait of aggressively wound control, pulled as tightly as her blond chignon. But beneath her veneer of competence and ambition, hairline cracks are beginning to show. Loneliness and alienation are a grey stew kept at bay with cheap sex, pills and the endless quest for success. As Winfried comes to understand the state his daughter is in, he sets out to disrupt her path with the creation of a character named Toni Erdmann, a stumbling, bewigged blowhard with huge teeth and a grandiose manner.

So begins an increasing surreal journey for both father and daughter, culminating in one of the painfully funny sequences in recent memory. Catharsis, yes, but more than that, Toni Erdmann calls to mind the idea of Saturnalia, a festival devoted to the necessity of upending societal structures. This does two things simultaneously — allowing these constraints to be seen, and also to be rendered ridiculous. It is this fundamental human impulse that makes Toni Erdmann such a revelation. The Lords of Misrule are allowed out to play and to rend the fabric of control long enough to let relief flood in, like a tidal surge.

Both these films are creatures of the big screen, deserving not only of a large canvas on which to tell their stories, but more importantly of the collective experience of being together in a movie theatre. At the screening of Toni Erdmann that I went to, the audience became part of the story. In the film’s most surprising scene, everyone in the theatre erupted, like they’d been waiting forever for this moment of license. In essence, we all went a bit cuckoo. Such comic invention is a high wire act, and certainly it cannot last, but that one surging instant of liberation, of being set free, felt a lot like letting your entire body fall into the ocean.

Both films are also about loneliness and the singular moments of connection that make life bearable, whether it’s between two lovers, two friends, a parent and child, or 400 people sitting together in a movie theatre. We can offer each other the possibility of change and redemption, but it often comes with considerable risk.

The naked truth of the body — painful, embarrassing, and apt to betray the clinical demands of the brain — is captured in different ways in each film. In Toni Erdmann, it is a too-tight dress and stubborn zipper that finally tips the balance and cracks everything wide open. In Moonlight, it is the moment Chiron finally lifts his eyes and looks at his friend, allowing desire to shine through in all its power and vulnerability. Surrender is the only way out.

The characters don’t ask for sympathy, and maybe because of that, it is freely and generously given. We, the audience, want them to succeed. We want them to break free of the self-imposed prisons that they have made, whether it is grey corporate control or the obliterating mask of conventional masculinity. A veiled gaze suddenly turned open, or the moment you let the inherent ludicrousness of life win and burst into song — both films hinge on an act of courage. You don’t know until the last minute if the people onscreen will manage it. And when they do, the world spins on its axis, turning the mechanisms of time and chance, so that the shining jumble of pieces rearrange themselves. It is message of hope — for us, for them, and for all the sad, crazy, desperate humans. And on we go, stumbling forward, holding out a hand and hoping that someone will grab on and hold tight.