Writer-director Hans Weingartner's new film is a very German thriller with a theme: whatever happened to the rebellious spirit of 1968? Daniel Brühl, who was trying hard to please his mother in last year's "Goodbye, Lenin" now plays Jan, a subversive Berlin youth who spouts anti-corporate slogans and gets himself arrested during sweatshop protests.
By day, Jan defends ticketless bums on the streetcar; by night he works for the revolution. Together with his friend Peter (Stipe Erceg), he breaks into the ostentatious villas that line the city's lakes. But like the drifters in the marvelous Korean film "3-Iron," Peter and Jan don't break and enter to steal: instead, they rearrange furniture, hide valuables in the refrigerator, and leave mysterious messages that are supposed to unsettle the wealthy oppressors of the proletariat.
Stipe Erceg and Julia Jentsch in "The Edukators"
Trouble brews when Jan falls in love with Peter's girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch), and a break-in turns into a botched kidnapping. The three have to escape from their cozy commune to a hut in the mountains, where the savvy millionaire Hardenberg (Burghart Klaussner) puts their theories about anarchy and free love to the test.
"The Edukators" is shot on handheld video with an edgy jump cut sensibility, but ultimately Weingartner relies on montage sequences that feel uncomfortably Hollywood for a movie so full of anti-capitalist Sturm und Drang. Every now and then, earnest talkiness veers into the sophomoric. But of course, that's part of the point: why is it, exactly, that talk of revolution sounds so ludicrous in polite society? Why does youthful idealism cause such awkward silences? With "The Edukators," Weingartner successfully dramatizes questions that aren't often asked out loud in a culture where irony is king.
"Wir haben Scheisse gebaut!" says Jule near the end of the movie, arriving at the same conclusion as Peter Fonda's character in "Easy Rider" -- "We blew it." Her insight comes 36 years too late, but "The Edukators" have also learned another lesson: good ideas survive. Their youthful optimism and hopes of changing the world are bound to fail, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying.
