THE EDUKATORS
D: Hans Weingartner; with Daniel Brühl, Julia Jentsch, Stipe Erceg, Burghardt Klaußner
Narrative Feature Spotlight
While Berlin sleeps, Jan (Brühl) and Peter (Erceg) stick it to the man – by breaking into the mansions of capitalist swine and repositioning their furniture and bric-a-brac. By day they spout anarchist bromides (“Fucking petty bourgeois values!” one translates from the original German). Enter Jule (Jentsch), Peter’s girlfriend, who makes it personal by targeting a certain capitalist swine (Klaußner) from her past. And from there the film becomes an agitprop parlor comedy set in a cabin in the Alps. Strange stuff, and Weingartner has the film on a long leash; sometimes it pauses to sniff a tree. On paper the story sounds farcical – and it sort of is – but the film is as much an examination of the (im)possibilities of idealism as it is a caper comedy, without stepping fully into the realm of satire (as in Luis Bu–uel’s Viridiana). It’s stilted at times, but the film has a loose-limbed charm and ties up satisfactorily in the third act.This article appears in March 18 • 2005.