The Edukators - Palm Beach Post movie review

'The Edukators': A brisk adventure for three unlikely crooks

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

There is a joke in the musical A Chorus Line where a dancer relates that he used to break into the homes of rich people, not to steal anything, but to rearrange the furniture. That is essentially the premise of an intriguing new German film, The Edukators, about a trio of trespassers intent not on remedial interior decorating, but on making a statement about crass materialism.

IFC Films

'The Edukators'

The verdict: Anti-capitalist protestors caught in a romantic triangle in a tongue-in-cheek kidnapping caper.

Director: Hans Weingartner
Starring: Daniel Bruhl, Julia Jentsch, Stipe Erceg, Burghart Klaussner, Peer Martiny
Run time: 124 minutes
Release date: July 22, 2005
Rating: R for language, a scene of sexuality, and some drug use.
See showtimes

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

Roommates Jan (Daniel Bruhl) and Peter (Stipe Erceg) disable alarm systems of Berlin Yacht Club members' homes, stack the furniture into free-form sculpture, place contemporary art in toilets and move a stereo system into a refrigerator. Before they flee, they leave behind notes with messages like "Your days of plenty are numbered" — which is the film's original German title — and sign them from "The Edukators."

Peter's girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch) also is committed to making political statements, as seen in an early sequence in which she participates in a protest against exploitative sports shoes manufacturers. But her criminal side blossoms when Peter travels to Barcelona and Jan coaxes her into helping him break into the home of a man to whom Jule owes 94,000 euros, having crashed into his Mercedes. Jule finds this taste of lawlessness exhilarating and also finds herself sexually attracted to Jan.

Naturally, as these things go, the businessman-homeowner returns while they are still there and they reluctantly kidnap him. They take him to Jule's uncle's empty mountain cabin. There Peter soon joins them and they form a romantic and criminal triangle, unsure of how to proceed with either one.

All of this is played as a romp, an adventure for three unlikely crooks. As the character names suggest, director and co-writer Hans Weingartner seems to be evoking the carefree, triangular romance of Francois Truffaut's 1961 Jules and Jim.

In any event, the trio soon develops an emotional attachment to their victim, who claims to be in agreement over their political statement. He insists he was once a young protestor himself and a commune-dwelling member of Students for a Democratic Society, though this all might be to increase his chances of being let go.

The film's tone is refreshingly breezy, as the overt politics get downplayed in favor of the interaction among the characters, both the odd-man-out love triangle and the mind games of captors and captive. Adding to the movie's brisk nature is Weingartner's hand-held camerawork and the grainy look of digital video.

Bruhl, who impressed in last year's Goodbye, Lenin, plays the relative idealist of the trio, Jan.

In contrast, Erceg (Peter) does not see the ethical dilemma if he happens to liberate a pricey watch from the rich while leaving their protest message.

All three principals fare well in a film that entertains, even if its political message is ultimately pretty slim.