While I didn't think this film was all that funny, and found the main character more maddening than anything else, it was thought-provoking, realistic, and always interesting. A father desperately wants to stay in his adult daughter's life, resorting to absurdity, corny jokes, and outright intrusion to do so (e.g. hiding in her bedroom closet, showing up at her workplace, meeting her friends, etc). He assumes an alter ego with a set of false teeth and a wig and pushes the limits for what lies he can get away with, but it's never in a mean-spirited way, and it's as if he's trying to stay relevant in a world that has passed his simple ways by.
The movie gives us a pretty pessimistic view of finding a work/life balance in the two extremes it shows us; the father (Peter Simonischek) has little ambition and is a bit of an oaf, and the daughter (Sandra Hüller) works in the soul-numbing capacity of devising corporate strategies to outsource work overseas. The best parts of the film for me were in the depiction of corporate life - the politics, the 'big presentation', the schmoozing, and the clear stratification of those in this world (and at the top of this world) with common people. In one fantastic moment Hüller looks out of a high-rise office window and down at people living in poverty. In another, when commenting on having to take an executive's wife out shopping in order to be on his good side, she quips "It's Europe's largest mall and no one has money to buy anything." The scene where father and daughter visit workers in the country and he inadvertently gets one fired is also powerful. How disheartening is it to hear her reaction: "That's up to him; the more he fires, the fewer I have to fire." We contrast this with the kindness and dignity shown by these people, inviting him into their home when he needs to use the bathroom, and giving him a sack of apples.
The film seems to be putting two things side by side - how the innocent moments of childhood slip away in one's life, and also, in a larger sense, how we've let something else slip away - our humanity.
Unfortunately, it gives us a seriously disgusting sex scene in a hotel room involving petit fours that frankly I wish I could un-see. It probably has a point on top of the shock value, something along the lines of how tawdry and non-erotic an affair may be, or how we see her dominate others after having to be submissive to superiors at work, passing along the dehumanization - but I wish this scene would have been excised. On the other hand, I suppose in moments like this, Hüller belting out Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All" in front of a houseful of strangers, and her impromptu 'naked party' with co-workers, the film keeps us engaged by not having any idea what's going to happen next. There is an absurdity to it all, and maybe the father's advice "Don't lose humor" - don't take things too seriously - is the best coping strategy to life, which is too short and often depressing.
Another beautiful scene in the film comes at the end, when the father explains how fleeting moments from her childhood float up into his mind, and how he wishes those moments could be held on to somehow - and yet, despite that realization, misses a moment in the present by going off to search for a camera in the attempt to capture it. It's pitch perfect.
