The story of ‘Oh Boy’ is quickly outlined: the life of main character Niko – played by the magnificent Tom Schilling in his starring role – has been dragging on aimlessly for two years. His successful father, a lawyer, transfers him 1,000 euros every month. He thinks Niko will use it to study law, which he quit a long time ago.
What exactly Niko’s problem is is never really made clear. He lives the day without a plan and is guided more by the people around him than he makes decisions himself. The deeper causes of this lethargy can only be elucidated through the comically beautiful but tragic encounters with other characters who, like him, seem trapped in their own world.
The A portrait of a large city, made up of nothing but lonely, confused existences, is currently streaming on Netflix.
“Oh Boy”: a great German youth film!
What “Oh boyWhat makes it seem so refreshingly anachronistic is its genuine love and sensitive tenderness for youth – in this case, the adolescence stage. Because where are the great German youth films that we are all talking about? While the coming-of-age film is an established and recognized genre in American cinema (see the Oscar win for Barry Jenkins’ masterpiece “Moonlight” in 2016), contemporary German cinema is teeming with reactionary boomer films – for a long time, from course led by Til Schweiger.
Whether good or bad, the last youth film or the last youth film series to reach a large audience in this country were the ‘Fack ju Göhte’ films – a series that, despite all the slapstick, is for me characterized by enormous contempt for the current, young generation.
‘Lazy’, ‘vulgar’, ‘uneducated’, ‘decadent’, ‘poor’, ‘antisocial’ are the friendliest qualities for young people that can be distilled from these films. However, these film fiascos are not so much the originators of this resentment, but rather mirrors a general societal hatred of young people and their needs, of which the educational and social policies of the past decades and the Corona education policy are only perfect symptoms.
The cinematic antithesis
‘Oh Boy’, on the other hand, goes against this reality and tackles a young person’s crisis with such dignity – and without casting him as an innocent victim of his circumstances.
Because what is gnawing at everyone here, especially Niko? Is it the emptiness of postmodernism, in which all the great stories are already a thing of the past and the barbaric national history is just a faint smoke in the collective memory? Is it the rigidity of bourgeois society, with its ideas about a successful and structured life, in which every path seems already mapped out and trampled, like the path that his father had mapped out for him as a lawyer? Or you areas he himself says at one point in the film: “Maybe the problem itself?”
The film raises these and many other questions when you watch it, but – and this is the great thing – this all happens not in a pretentious or didactic way, but very light-hearted and casual. Even without attempting to answer these big questions, it’s the beautiful black-and-white aesthetic, the magical acting ensemble, the beautifully melancholic jazz soundtrack and the incredibly closely observed humorous episodes, all of which are truly brilliant, that matter to make the movie. worth seeing.
Few films succeed in arousing feelings. It is even less possible to summarize an attitude to life concisely. Gerster achieves the greatest possible result with his university graduation film: a universal treatise on the trials and confusions of young adulthood, the painful search for one’s own voice, for meaning in an overwhelming world and the tragic inability to confront oneselfthat everyone can identify with in their own way.