Produced by Hans Weingartner and Antonin Svoboda                           Cast: Daniel Brühl, Julia Jentsch, Stipe Erceg, Burghart Klaußner.

Young, political activists Jan (Daniel Brühl) and Peter (Stipe Erceg) have a taste for breaking and entering the houses of the embarrassingly rich while the latter are away on vacation. Not that they steal anything, mind. After disabling the alarm system, they simply re-arrange the furniture in an artistic pile in the centre of the floor, move knick-knacks around, put the stereo in the fridge, and so on. When the rich return, the creepy feeling of having been invaded, their precious things disordered, together with a printed note saying “Your days of plenty are numbered!” or “You have too much money” and signed “The Edukators” are designed to unsettle the rich into divesting themselves of some of the means of their supposed embarrassment to worthy causes.

Peter’s girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch) has no idea of the young men’s nocturnal activities when she moves in temporarily following an eviction notice from her flat. Having to clean the flat up for handover means she cannot go with Peter on a trip to Barcelona. Jan agrees to help, and an initial tension soon turns to a twin seduction: sexual and subversive, direct, political activism - of the break-and-enter kind Jan usually practises with Peter. It’s more personal with Jule, whose resentment against the rich has her casually keying a Mercedes in a car park. She has a reason for picking the villa of absent millionaire Hardenberg (Burghart Klaußner). After some naughty frolicking in the indoor pool, a hurried departure to screeching alarms causes Jule’s phone to be left behind. Returning the next night, Hardenberg’s unexpected arrival necessitates that they enlist Peter’s help and the three kidnap the frightened rich man while they work out what further course of action to take.

Problems with this movie are not least in that writer/director Hans Weingartner allows an organic, almost undirected, unfolding of the action in a natural way, then imposes a political dialectic a little too didactically on it. This becomes a problem mainly in the third act, which drags with too much talking. From the moderately thrilling fast action drama of the second act, it traipses into a love triangle and a slow exploration of free love, friendship and the nature of freedom, then bolts back into socio-political treatise. The ending hammers home the point. Overall there’s a feeling that we are simply watching adolescent rebellion with its addiction to naughty thrills taken for a short walk and glamorised as Political Activism.
 
Both the premise of their ‘political action’ and the intended outcome are moot. Along with street protests and random acts of insurrection, they seem more to answer a youthful need to find a burning cause and act out rebellion. Jan and Peter’s revolutionary acts are limited in effect. In fact in the short term they are more likely to add to the wealth of home security firms, or add to the pressure on the Polizei to maintain civil obedience, instead of improving the welfare of child labourers in third world sweat-shops producing top-of-the-range running shoes for the West.

In addition, their nightly forays seem just as much about conquering fear and going beyond personal, socially conditioned, limitations. It’s a subversive way of self-empowerment for those who perceive themselves to be disadvantaged (there are other ways of conquering fear, etc). As such, the movie is very much tailored to the agenda of the director – who (according to the Production Notes) wants people to tap into their revolutionary zeal through watching the movie.
 
In a superficial comparison with Bertolucci’s tediously slow, but better credentialed, The Dreamers (2003), similarly about European youthful political activism, and pertinent to Hardenberg’s generation in 1968, The Edukators actually comes out marginally ahead in that the rash exuberance of youth, the aliveness and passion, are far more immediate than the desultory tone of the former. The Edukators are the Dreamers with consciousness and will (if reactionary).
 
The film polarises the concerns of young and poor vs. older and rich. Too simplistically, the young are aggressively idealistic, anti-capitalistic and provocatively humanistic. The older generation are conservative, trapped in consumerism, and fearful of losing the status quo. It’s not entirely clear whether the director intended to depict such a categorical polarisation, since the film teases us with the possibility of change, then slams shut that particular gate with a surprise flip ending which doesn’t quite save the film. One powerful saving grace (pun intended), however, is Leonard Cohen’s inspired Hallelujah, with its theme of desire, love, faith, the corruption of power and betrayal, played and sung in the plangent, soaring voice of Jeff Buckley, over the final scene.
 
And in fact it may or may not be the final scene – since the version I saw, that anyone outside of Germany will see, was the not-quite-finished version screened at Cannes (and which received a standing ovation). That alternative ending aspect fits with the loosely held directorial reins, but is not necessarily good directorial practice in a film.
 
Despite the uneven pace and plotline and stereotypical elements in characterisation, there is a natural, unforced humour and the performances of the four leads are fresh and good, especially the decisive, brooding Daniel Brühl, last seen in the extraordinary Goodbye, Lenin!. Julia Jentsch is delightful as the previously oppressed butterfly discovering her wings. Burghart Klaußner (also seen in Goodbye, Lenin!, as the father) as Hardenberg exudes a subtle sense of fear more or less all the time: least when he seems willingly to be accepting his imprisonment, and most when betraying his erstwhile, youthful principles, at which time he looks as though he’s expecting imminent retribution from the god of anti-capitalism. All four actors work very naturally together except when the didacticism comes in. Stipe Erceg effortlessly takes his character Peter through the most change but there’s no feeling that any of the characters have grown through a character arc – rather they just move along sideways.  Unfortunately, that’s when the whole exercise seems to lose faith.

© Avril Carruthers,                                                 18th February 2005