Movie Reviews by Michael Phillips

A Coffee in Berlin Movie Review & Trailer

Reports of the slim but impressive 83-minute German film "A Coffee in Berlin" -- titled "Oh Boy" in its popular initial European release -- have been inflated by the picture winning scads of awards in its country of origin upon initial release.

But we're here to talk about the movie, not the hype or the burden of expectation.

This Music Box Films release has a distinct and confident look, as sure of itself visually in its black-and-white evocations of Berlin as its protagonist is unsure of himself and his future.

Tom Schilling plays Niko, a university dropout who hasn't yet told his father that his monthly payments no longer go to the funding of higher education. Schilling has an intriguing James McAvoy quality, vulnerable but vaguely hostile, in his depiction of Lost Youth, 21st century German division.

Like Holden Caulfield in "The Catcher in the Rye" or Benjamin in "The Graduate," his anti-establishment sentiments are designed to appeal to all sorts of slackers, malcontents, loners and/or parents thereof in the audience.

Lighting a cigarette in his toaster, Niko greets another day and considers his options. Coffee comes first, and the running gag in "A Coffee in Berlin" has Niko perpetually in search of a cup but thwarted at every turn. Recently moved into a new apartment near the train line, Niko's forcibly befriended by neighbor Karl, whose wife has endured cancer treatments. Niko's actor friend (Marc Hosemann) takes our antihero out for a night on the town. They run into an old high school classmate of Niko's, Julika (Friederike Kempter), who is much changed: Formerly overweight and badly bullied for it by Niko, among others, she invites the boy-men to her performance art extravaganza.

It's depicted as a pretentious joke, to the point that when Niko tells Julika later that he found her work brave, it doesn't quite register as truth.

Who is this guy?

He is many things, and not one whole person, at least not yet. The writer-director of "A Coffee in Berlin," Jan Ole Gerster, keeps Niko's potential, his true colors, under wraps. The best moments are almost all non-verbal. Working with crack cinematographer Philipp Kirsamer, Gerster presents an epically forbidding Berlin in black-and-white, full of life but shadowed by terrible recent history.

The wittiest scene in this mordant black comedy comes when Niko visits the set of a World War II movie being shot, and the actor acquaintance speaks of his Nazi officer character as a morally conflicted sympathetic fellow in love with a Jew. The way he goes on, bringing himself to tears, an entire sub-genre of kitschy revisionist historical drama gets the whammy. Later, in a starker vein, Niko sits at a bar and drinks with an old man haunted by memories of Kristallnacht.

"A Coffee in Berlin" can't fully resolve its sardonic and serious impulses, and it scores some easy points against the usual authority figures (unfeeling fathers and frightening baristas, for starters). The film's surprising, enveloping jazz score is often deliberately at odds with Niko's moody outlook. Lately Chicago-based Music Box Films has specialized in acquiring diversions you think will be one thing but end up being a little nastier than advertised. "Le Week-End" was like that; "A Coffee in Berlin" is like that too, but it's a most promising debut feature.

"A Coffee in Berlin" - 3 Stars

No MPAA rating

Running time: 1:23.

"A Coffee in Berlin" Movie Trailer

 

About the Movie "A Coffee in Berlin"

Jan Ole Gerster's wry and vibrant feature debut A Coffee in Berlin, which swept the 2013 German Oscar Awards, paints a day in the life of Niko, a twenty-something college dropout going nowhere fast. Niko lives for the moment as he drifts through the streets of Berlin, curiously observing everyone around him and oblivious to his growing status as an outsider. Then on one fateful day, through a series of absurdly amusing encounters, everything changes.

"A Coffee in Berlin" Movie Review - "A Coffee in Berlin" Stars Tom Schilling and Friederike Kempter

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