The Edukators Hans Weingartner Germany 2004
Encapsulated by the quote ‘If you’re not a liberal before you’re thirty you lack a heart, if you are a liberal after thirty then you lack brains’, The Edukators is more supposedly ‘subversive’ anti-capitalistic German domestic box-office breaking fun, which certainly has a heart but withholds it’s brains until the second half. Our favourite Teutonic ex-communist with a conscience, Goodbye Lenin star Daniel Bruhl, tackles the mass markets by breaking into the houses of the moneyed and rearranging all their furniture in some sort of Feng Sui styled protest to ‘educate’ the victims in their errant ways. Bruhl and his partner, played by Stipe Erceg, in good-looking societal dissent, mess the formula up however when a girl (Julia Jentsch) joins their squat stacking the cards for a messy love triangle later on. Forced to take a businessman hostage after a bodged job, they retreat to the mountains to figure out their next move. Unfortunately their victim is a veteran from the riots of ’68 who abandoned his politics long ago.
Simplistic to the point of absurdity and equally politically naïve, The Edukators might as well to begin with be Shooting Fish (a 90s British caper movie) with fifth-former politics piped in direct from Rik Mayall off the Young Ones. Deriving humour in a similar way to Lukas Moodyson’s hippies in Together, the protagonist’s liberal mores are placed under the microscope. Probably having read ‘No Logo’ cover to cover these guys are all about image, making bold interior design marketing statements yet positing few solid political stances beyond the generic denouncement of the capitalistic dictatorship, absolution of developing world debt, feed the starving millions and so on. The only genuine altruistic act you see any of the characters do is when Bruhl gives a tramp a bus ticket. Admirable but unfocused, and that’s clearly the point as the latter seclusion shows.
Thankfully interaction between young and old values is what makes The Edukators considerably more interesting, especially as Hardenberg’s (Burghart Klaußner) radical past is revealed and he is forced to examine his situation and how he reached it. Being shacked up in the wilderness gives Harnenberg the one thing successful businessmen don’t always have, time, and it’s to the film’s credit that his recapture of his youth from outraged prisoner seems totally natural. The rest of the cast are equally agreeable, flirting, arguing and all the rest.
Pleasant, quite funny and certainly enjoyable, The Edukators is most likely all the things its young characters hate.
