I had high hopes about this generation P (for punk) movie set in the early 1980ies in West Berlin, directed by the renowned auteur Oskar Roehler, brim-full with the finest acting talent currently on the market (I'm not talking about Wilson Ochsenknecht, though), and cheered on by all the five reviews I read in different quality newspapers. Those critics spoke to me, and now I have this to say to them: You kind of failed to mention the salient point of this movie, that it's boring, ambling, wooden, contrived and boring. What little there is of a plot meanders through pastiches of those days gone by. Some of those individual scenes are quite good, and authentic, by the way. But they are strung together as if by an amateur.
1982, the provinces: Robert and his fried Gries (played by Tom Schilling and Frederick Laue, two excellent actors who are unfortunately clearly well into their mid-thirties) are 19-year-olds living at a boarding school in Coburg. Gries is a pimply young reactionary with a large shepherd dog, who leads a secret double life as a homosexual submissive. Robert is just a young malcontent who wants to get out. After a highly successful prank against one of their beardy lefty teachers, where they drug him into unconsciousness and then cut his golden locks off, Robert takes off to West Berlin. When he leaves school we see an armed man in military garb storm the school and supposedly open fire -- one of the many surreal gags of this movie. His mother refuses to subsidise Robert's change of address but hints that his father my be sitting on a stash of terrorist money, and also suggests that Robert should help her to kill her estranged brother. In Berlin, the destitute Robert meets a previous acquaintance, Schwarz, who offers his old mate a job and lodgings. The problem here is that we have previously seen Schwarz and Robert in a single brief scene together, where Schwarz is a hotshot riding a fast motorcycle with an equally fast woman in the backseat. So it's established that they're not friends in any way, so I had to wonder why Robert is welcomed by Schwarz with open arms. Well, they steal Robert's father's hoard, Robert falls in love with a stripper, they hang out with Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, hook up with Gries, try to start a drug ring, and eventually Robert gets deported to West Germany because he had been dodging his military service, although that was never mentioned before. The movie ends up with yet another surreal scene in Morocco.
This movie had the feel as if it had been shot by a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs. It's hyperactive, there are lots of funny ideas and scenes strung together, but there is nothing to keep your interest for 105 minutes, except for more wackiness.
1982, the provinces: Robert and his fried Gries (played by Tom Schilling and Frederick Laue, two excellent actors who are unfortunately clearly well into their mid-thirties) are 19-year-olds living at a boarding school in Coburg. Gries is a pimply young reactionary with a large shepherd dog, who leads a secret double life as a homosexual submissive. Robert is just a young malcontent who wants to get out. After a highly successful prank against one of their beardy lefty teachers, where they drug him into unconsciousness and then cut his golden locks off, Robert takes off to West Berlin. When he leaves school we see an armed man in military garb storm the school and supposedly open fire -- one of the many surreal gags of this movie. His mother refuses to subsidise Robert's change of address but hints that his father my be sitting on a stash of terrorist money, and also suggests that Robert should help her to kill her estranged brother. In Berlin, the destitute Robert meets a previous acquaintance, Schwarz, who offers his old mate a job and lodgings. The problem here is that we have previously seen Schwarz and Robert in a single brief scene together, where Schwarz is a hotshot riding a fast motorcycle with an equally fast woman in the backseat. So it's established that they're not friends in any way, so I had to wonder why Robert is welcomed by Schwarz with open arms. Well, they steal Robert's father's hoard, Robert falls in love with a stripper, they hang out with Nick Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, hook up with Gries, try to start a drug ring, and eventually Robert gets deported to West Germany because he had been dodging his military service, although that was never mentioned before. The movie ends up with yet another surreal scene in Morocco.
This movie had the feel as if it had been shot by a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs. It's hyperactive, there are lots of funny ideas and scenes strung together, but there is nothing to keep your interest for 105 minutes, except for more wackiness.