A Coffee in Berlin Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

A Coffee in Berlin Blu-ray Movie Review

How do you say 'slacker' in German?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 23, 2014

Richard Linklater’s 1991 opus Slacker helped give a descriptive name to a certain behavioral lifestyle of sanguine laissez faire tendencies, but somewhere along the way “slacker” ended up being applied mostly to twenty-somethings, despite a somewhat broader demographic actually wafting in and out of Linklater’s film. The first decade of supposed adulthood has been ripe territory for mining, especially with indie minded filmmakers, and quite often characters at that time of their lives are depicted as somewhat aimless and unformed, letting life imprint upon their shapeless clay, sometimes frankly without much consequence. That’s evidently a universal phenomenon, not one isolated to Austin, Texas (as in Slacker), at least as evidenced by 2012’s A Coffee in Berlin (originally released as Oh, Boy). This unassuming litle film doesn’t have Linklater’s structural ingenuity, which may in fact be a detriment, but it still managed to sweep Germany’s version of the Academy Awards, bringing home trophies for Best Film, Best Screenplay (Jan Ole Gerster), Best Director (Gerster again), Best Actor (Tom Schilling), Best Supporting Actor (Michael Gwisdek) and Best Score (The Major Minors and Cherilyn MacNeil). Cynics might wonder what all the fuss is about, for much like its protagonist Niko Fischer (Tom Schilling), A Coffee in Berlin wanders to and fro without ever really amounting to much. It’s keenly observational (probably one of its chief assets), but the humor is hit and miss, sometimes playing archly black but at other times aiming for something closer to farce. Ironically tethering the story to one focal character (with some hangers on, of course) ultimately brings up a central question which was nowhere to be found in Slacker, namely: That’s it? Linklater’s structural innovation was an obvious analogue to the kind of random quality that many of his characters exhibited, but here director Jan Ole Gerster simply puts Niko through an increasingly bizarre set of vignettes that don’t seem to have any particular subtext. That kind of randomness may at least slightly undercut the film’s impact, though taken on its own terms, A Coffee in Berlin offers a very distinctive viewing experience.

Alexander may currently be having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, but he doesn’t have much on Niko. The film opens with Niko stumbling through an awkward breakup with his girlfriend (after evidently having sampled her carnal pleasures one last time), and then retreating to his apartment where he’s further discouraged to realize he is almost late for an appointment. A frantic rush through Berlin’s public transportation system ultimately delivers him into the unctuous hands of a court appointed psychologist, who is out to divine whether Niko deserves to have his driving license returned after several DUI infractions. This scene plays like low level Kafka at times, with Niko facing increasingly irrelevant and personal questions from an inscrutable but arrogant bureaucrat.

Needless to say, Niko does not get his driving privileges restored, but that’s just the beginning of a cascading series of misadventures. He goes to a coffee shop and is confounded by the barista’s various choices (what else is new?), ultimately deciding on what he thinks is just plain, old coffee. It of course turns out to be a specialty item that costs more than the few cents he has. When he attempts to get more money at an ATM, the machine eats his card, and then he scrapes the bottom of the barrel (or at least the paper cup) when he tries to take back his “spare” change which he just left for a homeless man. Niko is obviously a sad sack, especially as played by Schilling, who has a kind of Dane DeHaan (Life After Beth) wide-eyed dolefulness about him.

Even trying to find refuge back at his apartment spells a certain kind of disaster for Niko, when a curious upstairs neighbor drops by and then quickly devolves into near hysteria as he recounts various traumas in his life. The tone here may be aiming for black comedy, but it’s too raw feeling to really land in any fashion other than awkwardly dramatic. The film finds a better sense of humor in the longer escapades that soon unfold with Niko and his buddy Matze (Marc Hosemann), especially after they “meet cute” with an old school acquaintance of Niko’s named Julika (Friederike Kempter). That in turn ultimately leads them to a movie set where a hokey drama of starcrossed love between a Nazi and a Jew is being filmed.

That World War II reference is evidently not completely random, for in the film’s final vignette, Niko encounters an elderly man at a bar (Michael Gwisdek) who almost anecdotally starts referring to Kristallnacht. After an unexpected turn of events, the film turns resolutely dramatic again (maybe even melodramatic), though this plot point seems to have at least temporarily shaken Niko out of his indolence.

A Coffee in Berlin has a lot to recommend it, but its tone is wildly uneven, making its darker comedic aspects at times hard to fathom. Aimlessness is certainly a worthwhile subject, but it perhaps requires even greater deliberation and attention paid to storytelling and theme. Pirandello famously gave the world Six Characters in Search of an Author, but here Gerster has perhaps given us one, Niko, in search of some sort of meaning. Some audience members may feel a certain sort of empathy with him, wondering what it all means as they trundle along with him on his peculiar journey.

A Coffee in Berlin Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

A Coffee in Berlin is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Music Box Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. The IMDb reports this as having been shot with a Red One, and yet even a cursory examination of the screenshots accompanying this review reveal grain, or at least its digital approximation. In what seems to be the latest (and to my way of thinking, kind of odd) digital tool in filmmakers' arsenals, "grain" is being added to digitally shot features to approximate a more filmic appearance. Putting aside the wisdom of that technique, the result here often ends up looking something akin to Super 16, with a slightly fuzzy image and at times rather heavy grain. The apparently deliberate oddity here is how the grainfield tends to fluctuate from scene to scene (contrast screenshot 1 with screenshot 17 for just one example). The slightly diffuse quality of the cinematography actually helps with the mood of the piece, and there's excellent gray scale and appealing blacks in this black and white feature. Close-ups offer very good detail (screenshot 1 again, as well as screenshot 7). Some scenes are not especially artfully lit (screenshot 13), which can detract at times from detail. There are no issues with image instability or artifacts.

A Coffee in Berlin Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The best thing about A Coffee in Berlin's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is also one of the film's nicest stylistic gambits, the use of a jazz inflected score that will no doubt remind many of similarly themed (sorry) work by Woody Allen. The music nicely spills through the surrounds, and offers sure support for several scenes which are basically montages of Berlin street life. The bulk of the film is somewhat more reserved in its sonic ambitions, relying on small scale dialogue scenes with occasional intrusions from the noisy cityscape. Everything is rendered cleanly and clearly, with quite a bit of nuance (listen to the great echoes as Niko storms up the steps of his new apartment building). Fidelity is excellent in this problem free track.

A Coffee in Berlin Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• A Coffee With Jan Ole Gerster and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (1080p; 39:59) is a far ranging and generally very interesting discussion from November 2013 in Chicago. Dig those bright green Music Box Films coffee cups!


• Composing the Score (1080p; 4:32) is a brief look at the film's jazz infused music.


• Julika Screen Test (1080p; 3:29) is in color (!), but looks weirdly anamorphically stretched.


• Improv with Tom Schilling (1080p; 4:42) is frankly more of a showcase for co-star Marc Hosemann.


• Outtakes (1080p; 9:44)


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 3:47)


• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:03)

A Coffee in Berlin Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm not sure how to say 'slacker' in German, other than to state my hunch is it's multisyllabic and with an ungainly consonant to vowel ratio. One way or the other, A Coffee in Berlin has a fine eye and ear for character, but its rambling series of vignettes never seems to connect the dots in any meaningful way. Despite this somewhat inchoate quality, A Coffee in Berlin is an audacious debut by Gersten, and fans of indie Art House fare are sure to love this odd but weirdly charming film. Technical merits are very strong, and A Coffee in Berlin comes Recommended.