Oh Boy is 24 hours in the life of Niko, a young and aimless Berliner who has given up on his studies to “think
about me and you”. As he parses through the rising challenges of an idle life – he loses his license and his father stops providing financial support – we meet his actor friend Matze and his former classmate Julika who stars in a performance of ‘experimental theatre’. While his father wants him to “cut his hair and get a job,” Niko’s purpose seems to be limited to finding (remarkably elusive) coffee and a light for his cigarettes.
In many ways, this German film features Berliner life through Niko’s reactions. The main actor (Tom Schilling) has mastered the craft of reflecting and amplifying the events he lives through with body posture, facial expressions and stark comments. This often leads to laughter where more morose feelings are supposedly in order. When his odd, middle-aged and slightly stalker-behaved neighbor visits Niko to give him his wife’s meatballs and confide to him his deepest personal anxieties and frustrations only to end up crying on Niko’s floor, shots of Niko’s face always bring the audience back to a critical and ironic point of view. The scene cuts also play this game of action/reaction: in the scene that immediately follows, Niko throws the meatballs in the toilet.
The tragicomic tone follows Niko as he is thwarted in the simplest tasks: getting coffee, retrieving money that he has just given to a homeless person when he realizes that his credit card won’t work, or paying for a metro ticket. In my opinion, the danger of a film with such a drifting narrative (I’m thinking of this year’s Frances Ha as well) is that it can lose subtlety by committing to an overly wistful tone and having as a main theme the ‘meaninglessness of all interactions’. Does Oh Boy fit this decadent frame? In fact, I would argue that few interactions are meaningless for Niko. While his romantic dynamic with Iulika leads to a dead end, she has a strong personality that inspires him. Niko is most genuine in the movie when he tells Iulika that he could “never have done that” about her theatrical performance. Her demonstration of standing up for a principle when she assuredly talks back to thugs is paralleled (though in a weaker way) by Niko’s sudden interest in the health of the drunken man who dies at the end. We could easily imagine that this final gesture of human kindness was inspired by Iulika, which lends the earlier interaction a delicious subtlety.
While the film’s narrative drifts, themes come back. Nazi History overshadows Niko’s odyssey, through the movie that Matze’s friend stars in. However, the take on History evolves in a nice arc. The movie within the movie has a fakeness to it, and Gerster’s tone is clearly sarcastic – we could be looking at a criticism of the movie industry’s appropriation and reinterpretation of History for its own purposes. Mostly though, this episode interprets History as a grand scheme: wars, generals and love stories broken down. The drunken man at the end has a different History to tell: one of small episodes, of details and of private families. Niko’s subsequent transformation indicates that the latter kind might be one that has true power to teach and inspire. It transforms the drunken man into a father figure (his actual father’s recommendations to “get a job” and better his swing at golf seem to have no effects on Niko’s behavior) and perhaps Niko’s only instantiation of family in the movie.
WHALEBACK REVIEWS 