As "A Coffee in Berlin" goes on, the lack of coffee becomes emblematic of the feeling that the world is somehow massed against him. The coffee machine is broken, or the vending machine is out of order, or the urn is empty, or a simple cup of coffee costs over three Euros. Niko is thwarted throughout the film in his quest to get a cup of coffee. It's all part of the larger world with which Niko cannot seem to connect. Cinematographer Philipp Kirsamer manages to fill the film with a bustling sense of the urban sprawl of Berlin, with Niko making his way through all of the busses and trains and subway stations, as well as a collage-impression of a city in flux, with vacant lots, graffiti, empty squares at dawn. His openness to others, and then his gentle confusion as things go south (and they always do), is part of his isolation, and also why the film is so strangely and consistently funny. Niko confesses early on that he often doesn't understand what other people are saying to him, that they speak the same language but somehow he's not getting the message. The score of "A Coffee in Berlin" (original music composed by Cherilyn MacNeil and The Major Minors) is soft and jazzy, light and flippant, creating a comedic mood even when the actual events seem bleak. Extras mill around outside, some wearing yellow stars and some wearing Swastikas, smoking cigarettes and talking shop. The friend, in his SS uniform, tells Niko and Matze the plot and gets so worked up by his fictional character's dilemma that he wells up with tears, all as his listeners squirm with embarrassment. One of Matze's friends plays the lead in the movie-within-a-movie, and it's the story of a romance between an SS officer and a Jewish woman. There's even a movie-within-a-movie, as Niko and his friend Matze ( Marc Hosemann) visit the set of a film being shot in Berlin so that Matze (an aspiring actor) can try to weasel his way into a part. Anyone who has ever sat through an overly-earnest performance art piece and yearned to laugh, or at least inject some irony into the proceedings, will relate. She invites him to attend a performance-art piece put on by her theatre group, which leads to one of the funniest sequences in a film full of funny sequences. With each person Niko meets, you wait for the other shoe to drop. He runs into an old classmate named Julika ( Friederike Kempter), who seems happy to see him and yet also reminds him that he called her "Roly Poly Julia" back in school she was sent to a "boarding school for fat people" to recover. There's a beautiful tension in every interaction. The film gains momentum as it goes along. It takes a very deft hand to handle such material: to make it both awkward and comedic, inappropriate and true. They have known one another 10 minutes when this operatic moment occurs. The scene seems at first that it will be a friendly meet-and-greet until the neighbor, a big bulky guy, suddenly begins to open up about his lonely life, and how he just wants to watch football in peace, and how his wife recently had a mastectomy (he sobs, "They took her whole rack!"), and it ends with the man crumpling down the wall, weeping, all as Niko looks on. Just one example of many: Niko has moved into a new apartment, and his nosy upstairs neighbor (Justus von Dohnányi) shows up at the door with a bowl of his wife's meatballs. Schilling is a beautiful actor, accessible and vulnerable, and a veritable "Everyman" when compared to the kooks he encounters. What is truly delightful about the film is its loopy, gently slapstick sense of humor, its use of continuous running gags that pay off cumulatively (no small feat), and the dreamy sense that Schilling's somnambulism is pierced through only by the insane incomprehensible behavior of others.
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