Coffee in Berlin
remember the sickly feeling of wanting to criticize coffee for all the strings you attached to it. But coffee is mighty tall, immobile and mocks all his fellow drugs for their lack of subtlety.
I cannot imagine this film being in color. One might find it a nutty classicholia but it was required. If there is coffee, there is black. The film introduces us to a thin but a very attractive young man, who, having dropped out from law school two years ago, still has not informed his father of the fact and accepts the fees anyway. In his new apartment, he finds himself out of money- so much so that to afford one cup of coffee, he has to visit his father (who apparently is very rich). Then, a very delicate series of scenes pass the screen-a film inside a film, a gentle reminder of the Holocaust and an appearance of a horny but thin woman. The film ends with an old guy whining about the changes Berlin has been through and his utmost dissatisfaction to it for no reason.
When asked about what he had been doing for the last two years if not attending his school, the protagonist replies “I have been thinking....” and we immediately find a hint of intellectual suffering and anticipate the father’s criticism to impractical philosophy until the protagonist adds, “about me, you..”. Here, we are left to understand that this is not a great treatise on solitude or coffee but is rather a detailed account of a generation. But in the way the cinematographer captures the shallow and busy streets of Berlin, we are also left to wonder if the nationality of the protagonist has any part in his smoky psychological vicinity or rather if this film is only about Germany’s young generation.
The coffee is hard to get and so is a non-complicated character (excluding maybe the protagonist’s male friend Matze). One scene where Julika gets Niko beaten up thanks to her reprimand tells the viewer just how off-the-track our conclusions can be but, at the same time, we run a risk to be exactly correct. Julika has still not gotten over her childhood and Niko has never been hung up on it (except maybe when coffee was free)