Oh Boy

Synopsis: A day in the life of an unemployed 20-something Berliner (Tom Schilling).  

Although the title of writer-director Jan Ole Gerster’s debut film is taken from The Beatles’ classic song of estrangement, "A Day In The Life", its tenor is more jazz than pop, more ironic than rebellious.

Shot in black and white, the film follows the adventures of Niko, a young man who has dropped out of law school and spent the past two years thinking about his life and life in general. Nothing much happens and other than a running joke about Niko’s continually frustrated desire for a cup of coffee the film is a series of innocuous events.

Recalling the freshness of “New Wave”  films like Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series and Jim Jarmusch’s early efforts, the beauty of Oh Boy is the way that it captures the quiddity of the mundane with its melancholy and ever-so-slight absurdity in such an unforced way. Tom Schilling is well cast in the lead role as a very ordinary stranger in a strange land, a young man of good intentions unable to find his place in the world.

The final section of the film which refers to Germany’s Nazi past feels a little pointed but, of course, this may not be how the film was perceived in its home market where it was a sleeper hit, so much so that it beat out the big budget epic Cloud Atlas to win Best Film at the Lolas, Germany's version of the Oscars whilst Schilling won Best Actor and singer/songwriter Cherilyn MacNeil and the band The Major Minors won best score.  Such encomiums perhaps will produce inflated expectations but notwithstanding Oh Boy is a very neat little film which gets its dryly humorous portrait of post-adolescent alienation just right.

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