Reverting to its original title from the more accurate if neutral A COFFEE IN BERLIN, OH BOY is, on the face of it, a shaggy dog story. Young slacker Niko (Tom Schilling) tries, and for the most time fails, to find a cup of coffee around town. Not exactly a spoiler because this quest is soon swallowed up in the film’s deeper themes, at times coming to resemble a yuppie nightmare similar to Scorsese’s AFTER HOURS.
Niko’s aimless lack of commitment and interest in the outside world and everyone around him is immediately apparent when he leaves the comfort of his girlfriend’s flat, setting up in a gloomily empty apartment of his own. It’s paid for by his father, Walter’s contribution to fees for the law studies Niko abandoned two years earlier. Discovering this, Walter closes the account which Niko only realises when trying to use his cashcard to pay the extra euros for an exotic blend of coffee. The machine swallows the card. He then tries to retrieve the odd change he’s dropped into a tramp’s cup, but is shamed after being spotted.
On such incidents and their unexpected consequences, the narrative of OH BOY is built. Accompanied by an upbeat jazzy score, Niko carries along through his day. The realisation dawns that the characters surrounding Niko are in a far worse mental state than he; from the predatory shrink, who refuses to renew his driving licence after a minor drinking infraction, to Niko’s new upstairs neighbour, a mine of too-much-information about his sex-life and his wife’s mastectomy.
“…OH BOY turns out to be a genuine crowd-pleaser…”
The film’s centre-piece, which is both comical and unpredictably sinister, is Niko’s reunion with ‘Roly Poly Julia’, a girl he knew at school who apparently overcame her weight issues and is now a performance artist in a grotesquely pretentious acting troupe. The film seems dangerously close to straying into clichéd ranting-artist territory — but what follows jolts Niko out of his apathy and into action.
Niko becomes truly engaged after another fruitless coffee episode in a bar, when an ancient drunk suddenly opens up about his memories of Kristallnacht in 1930s Berlin. The reality could hardly be in starker contrast to the film set Niko strays into — a syrupy doomed romance between a sensitive SS Officer and a Jewish bookseller. OH BOY wears its historical references lightly, but they are ever-present, like the graffiti disfiguring the urban landscape, pictured as we follow Niko on his journey from self-absorption, to a sort of understanding in the film’s final images.
That OH BOY turns out to be a genuine crowd-pleaser (and multi award-winner after its release in Germany two years ago) is a tribute to the charm of Tom Schilling’s performance in a difficult role. The clear vision of writer-director Jan Ole Gerster, who juggles his themes with great self-confidence, delivering a glowing black-and-white portrait of modern-day Berlin in all its slightly scuzzy magnificence is also to be applauded.
OH BOY screens on 31st Aug at 16.00 at the Cambridge Film Festival.
httpvh://youtu.be/s9GOvKPAy1g