Oh Boy

Oh boy, a German movie. Dreadful and full of negative expectations I did watch Oh Boy and…I liked it! German cinema is not my favorite place to be, hence it’s predominant lack of good films. Sometimes there are exceptions, that of course, when I dare to watch one of them again. I can’t even remember which German film I liked the last time. Oh Boy from writer-director Jan Ole Gerster is however now one of them.

It is a film about a wandering boy (Tom Schilling) in Berlin, who does not know what he wants to do with his life. He reflected for two years on his life, while his father thought he was studying law. The boy took the fathers money month after month until the latter found out in a character revealing fashion. The boy does not have the best of relationship with his father – and now he has none. Left alone with some Euros he keeps on wandering through Berlin with his kind of weird friends and encounters other questionable people like a lonely neighbor, who just wants to get away from his wife and invites himself into the flat of the boy. Then there is an old man in a bar, who tells a story about his childhood in war time Germany.

It is the discoveries and the way of the boy that is interesting in Oh Boy. It really is not about too much important topics. It rather is about a human being who just does not know what to do with his life and drifts off to where ever the city takes him. It’s a very calm movie, enriched with conversations and encounters, which entertain so much that the rather short duration time flies even faster. Tom Schilling does a well job to personate a kind of victim of the city and it’s people.

Oh Boy is shot in a very nice black and white tone, filled with great scenes of Berlin. It helps the film to get a certain meaningful look and feeling, which would not have been necessary, but is nice nonetheless. I don’t want to praise it too much, it’s at best a matinee watch for what it is, but an entertaining one. Best watched with a cup of coffee.

__________[ 6,5/10 ]__________