Review: A Coffee in Berlin

[Grade: B] A combination of bad luck, bad choices and bad karma add up to one long, bad day for a twentysomething slacker.

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES: Niko Fischer (Tom Schilling) has a long, bad day in Jan Ole Gerster’s debut film.

City Paper grade: B

A combination of bad luck, bad choices and bad karma add up to one long, bad day for twentysomething slacker Niko Fischer (Tom Schilling) in director Jan Ole Gerster’s debut, A Coffee in Berlin. Gerster wears his influences on his sleeve, crafting a study of a hapless and not always likable character accompanied by the breezy jazz and wry narcissism of Woody Allen and surrounded by deadpan eccentrics, seemingly imported from an early Jim Jarmusch indie. Niko begins his day by trying to steal away from his sleeping girlfriend, whose reaction to his evasive excuses suggest a long string of disappointments. This is followed by a psych exam mandated by his too-frequent D.U.I.s, a prerequisite for regaining his driver’s license. Niko’s eyes constantly dart around, suggesting the discomfort and self-rationalization behind his unkempt, boyish exterior. Too many of the situations in which Niko finds himself over the course of the film’s 24 hours are familiar — from the disapproving country-club father playing golf with a more successful surrogate son to an atrocious modern dance performance. Gerster finds more interesting territory in Berlin’s uneasy relationship with its own past. Niko stops in at a bar where a drunk launches into his childhood recollection of Kristallnacht, wondering how he could ride his bike with all of that broken glass on the ground. Generations removed from the war, its echoes still haunt the city, while Niko is confronted by his own past in the form of a young woman whom he bullied to near-suicide when they were childhood classmates. Gerster never manages to tie all these threads together, but their intimations are more intriguing than his attempts to cover familiar situations with black-and-white stylization.