SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL (OFFICIAL COMPETITION): The Berlin-set Oh Boy, about a young unemployed college dropout with the world's worst luck, has proven a sizeable box office hit in its native Germany, yet has managed to achieve this while maintaining high artistic ambitions.
more than just a hit comedy
The film is often highly amusing, and yet the day after seeing it I realised it had sunk into my mind way more deeply than that adjective would usually allow. This makes it more than just a hit comedy – it makes it an interesting phenomenon.
Premiering in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival, it was described in the official blurb as a slacker comedy, but if we must use a label, I prefer to call it a 'tragicomedy". That’s how broadcaster Deutsche Welle described the film when it swept the German Film Awards this year, winning six prizes, including best feature, and best director and screenplay for its first time writer-director, Jan Ole Gerster.
The narrative is episodic and simple: we follow a day in the life of as bewildered young man in which pretty much everything seems to go wrong. Deadpan anti-hero Niko (newcomer Tom Schilling) has been surviving for the last two years on cheques from his father, who has assumed he was at university all this time. After being dumped by his girlfriend, Niko undergoes an almost Gestapo-like grilling from an absurdly overzealous bureaucrat who declines to renew his driving license from an earlier drink-driving ban. Bad start.
On this day the most routine tasks of life prove disastrous: getting a coffee in a trendy café, using an ATM, buying a train ticket. His new apartment proves no haven, thanks to a boorish new neighbour’s aggressive idea of hospitality (inviting himself in with a gift of alcohol and repulsive meatballs and then breaking down in tears).
The one chink of light is a chance encounter with Julie, a slender blonde who happens
to be an old classmate, but even that’s more complicated than it looks. She quickly reminds him that, when she was carrying more kilos, he used to cruelly taunt her with the nickname of 'Roly Poly Julie’.
Gerster’s chief achievement here is to lend an appealing comic flavor to a familiar trope from modernist European literature – the existential distress of an abject young person living on the edge of society – without betraying its serious origins. If the shabby and permanently downcast Niko seems familiar, it’s because he’s an heir to the protagonists of Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and Crime and Punishment, Hamsun’s Hunger, and more distantly, perhaps, Joyce’s Ulysses.
I know that sounds pretentious for what, on the surface, seems like an entertaining German answer to the early films of Jim Jarmusch, with their similarly cool black and white cinematography and comical moping. But as the film nears its climax, Gerster makes unambiguously clear the seriousness underlying his comedy.
Earlier references to Nazism are played for laughs, but the sadness of it all finally catches up with Niko when a drunken older man in a bar regales him with his childhood memories of watching his father take part in Kristallnacht, the start of the Nazi pogrom against the Jews. A haunting montage sequence of Berlin’s empty streets in the early morning – obviously inspired by Antonioni’s famous ending to L’Eclisse – adds to the muted tone. This is a film about a city whose tragic recent past is inscribed into his buildings and people at every turn.
The film’s second achievement is to carve out a fresh space for itself in a German film scene generally divided between two extremes: the flagrantly commercial comedies of actor-directors Til Schweiger and Matthias Schweighöfer, and deadly serious art films, especially those produced by the so-called 'Berlin school’ including directors Christian Petzold and Christoph Hochhäusler. By siding with neither faction, but cannily pitching himself into the fertile ground between them, Gerster has made himself a filmmaker to closely watch.
Lynden Barber writes a blog about German cinema at the Goethe-Institut Australia website.
