REVIEWED - THE EDUKATORS/DIE FETTEN JAHRE SIND VORBEI: Pretty much every member of that 1970s cabal of British left-wing playwrights who wore fisherman's caps and Zapata moustaches wrote a play in which a representative of the boss class was kidnapped by angry young revolutionaries, writes Donald Clarke
Dialogue about exchanging control of the means of production was generally followed by beheadings and cannibalism. This modestly involving drama, the first German-language film to compete at Cannes in over a decade, is a nimbler, less didactic beast.
Times have, after all, changed. The rebels - not quite anarchists, not quite communist, not really pro-anything in fact - define themselves purely in terms of their opposition to (furrow brow) globalisation. Their prisoner, abducted more by accident than design, was himself once a member of a commune. Ultimately, The Edukators, whose plot too often verges on the absurd, is more about the battle between youth and experience than that between left and right.
Jan (Daniel Brühl, star of Good Bye Lenin!) and Peter (Stipe Erceg), two elegantly stringy Berlin youths, spend their evenings visiting situationist havoc on the residents of the city's comfortable suburbs. Taking addresses from the membership list of a yacht club, they break into mansions, rearrange the furniture in fantastic shapes, douse antique ornaments in the lavatory and leave quaintly outraged notes - "You have too much money" - about the place.
When Peter leaves town for a spell, Jan becomes dangerously close to his pal's girlfriend, Jule (Julia Jentsch), who, having earlier crashed her car into the back of a businessman's BMW, is many thousands of euros in debt. Peter and Jule slip into the car owner's house and fling his sofa into the swimming pool. Foolishly, Jule leaves her mobile phone behind. When the kids return to retrieve it, they are discovered and soon - in circumstances that don't really make much sense - all three Edukators find themselves driving poor Herr Hardenberg (Burghart Klaußner) to a remote cabin in the mountains.
The three young leads bring a proper callowness to their performances, while Klaußner finds poignancy in a man who, though frightened and angry, sees something of his younger self in his captors. The debates the four have over canned goods and grass touch on an intriguing question: Is it possible - or even desirable - to retain the idealism of youth into middle age?
The film's twisty, slightly silly ending (which contains an apparent allusion to Volker Schlöndorff's The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum) suggests two conflicting answers. This is as it should be.
