film home news music film arts lifestyle dining calendar columns guides classifieds personals A Failure of Imagination It's the second breaking-into-people's-houses film of the summer, but is no by Ann Lewinson - August 11, 2005 PUBLICITY PHOTO Feature Revolutionaries: Jan (Daniel Brühl), Jule (Julia Jentsch) and Peter (Stipe Erceg) So you want to be a rebel. You go down to Urban Outfitters and buy a Che Guevara T-shirt, unapologetically sweatshop-sewn, swipe your credit card, and chain owner Richard Hayne takes your money and writes another check to Rick Santorum. As the activists in //The Edukators // complain, it's so hard to be a rebel when dissent has been commodified. Or are they just making excuses? In Hans Weingartner's second feature, two young men don ski masks, break into the homes of wealthy Berliners, and rearrange their furniture. They leave their victims a note: "Your days of plenty are numbered." So far so good. After Kim Ki-duk's stunningly romantic //3-Iron //, it's the second breaking-into-people's-houses film of the summer, but //The Edukators // is no //3-Iron //. The set-up is great--reminiscent of the anti-WTO stunts pulled by The Yes Men in their eponymous documentary last year--but Weingartner's painstakingly methodical storytelling drains the premise of most of its wild energy. (Although if you've ever wanted to learn how to break into a house, this movie gives you everything but the code to disable the alarm system.) It's not until the second hour, when the Edukators kidnap a wealthy businessman (Burghart Klaussner), that things get interesting. But the provocative issues raised in their conversations--and this movie is heavy with talk, most of it thought-provoking--are dropped with the implausible don't-trust-anyone-over-30 ending. Jan (Daniel Brühl of //Goodbye Lenin //), a handsome, dour rebel, and Peter (Stipe Erceg), his more easygoing friend, live in artful squalor with no visible means of support, albeit with alt-rock star haircuts that must have cost a few Euros and an endless supply of cigarettes, wine and marijuana. When they're not breaking into people's houses, they're leafletting stores that sell sneakers made in sweatshops. You can tell Peter is less committed to the revolution because he wears Adidases and parties in Barcelona. And he has a girlfriend, who will soon come between them. Her name is Jule (Julia Jentsch), in apparent homage to //Jules and Jim //, and it takes Peter--who apparently has never read //Emma Goldman //--a couple of hours to figure out that monogamy is part-and-parcel of the bourgeois capitalist racket. Jule is waiting tables to work off the cost of a Mercedes she hit while driving without insurance. The characters refer to this bill rather awkwardly as a "debt" to draw a parallel to the issue of Third World debt, which they contend must be forgiven. This self-aggrandizement could be taken as satire if it were just the characters making this connection, but it soon becomes clear that they are mouthpieces for Weingartner and co-screenwriter Katharina Held, and nothing more. A little ironic distance would have produced a richer, more complicated film, but Weingartner, who cites Michael Moore and Costa-Gavras as influences, has written in his director's statement that he made //The Edukators // as a call to action--and he wants the furniture-rearranging stunt to demonstrate that political action can be fun. Yes, political action can be fun, particularly when the men look like Daniel Brühl. But the problem with using "fun" as a lure is that when it's time to lick envelopes, the folks who were in it for the fun are off having fun. And counterproductively, much of the fun the left produces only entertains itself and keeps its issues from being taken seriously. Giant puppets will get you on the 6 o'clock news, but they won't put you in the White House. Weingartner uses the apparatus of seat-of-your-pants cinema--handheld video cameras and available light--but can't free himself from the more bourgeois conventions of cinematic storytelling. There's a "let's make a mess putting up wallpaper and get paint on each other and laugh" scene, cut like a music video, and a "whoops he fell into the pool and so he pulled her in and wouldn't you know it they're kissing" scene. It's a similar failure of imagination that scores the last 10 or so minutes with Jeff Buckley's cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," a great recording of a great song that is fast become the new Barber Adagio. This signifier of dark-night-of-the-soul-searching has turned up on the soundtrack CD for Moore's //Fahrenheit 911 //, as well as on "The O.C.," "The West Wing," "Crossing Jordan," "Scrubs," "Third Watch," "Without a Trace" and "LAX" (not to mention the John Cale version in //Shrek //)--and it's clear that no one has listened to the words. The royalties may be keeping Cohen in Viagra, but as my mind wandered to the contents of my refrigerator and whether I should pick up a falafel on the way home, another, more apt Leonard Cohen lyric was snarling in my head: "They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/For trying to change the system from within/I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them/First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin." Search browse the archives film listings by film title by film theater more in this section A Canadian Youth Clings to a Crazy Dream (08/11/05) by John Boonstra Wartime Heroism in the Philippines (08/11/05) by John Boonstra When TV Was Good (08/11/05) by John Adamian section archives » by this author ANN LEWINSON Blood Sport (07/28/05) by Ann Lewinson Penguin Love (07/14/05) by Ann Lewinson Coming Out Made Easy (06/16/05) by Ann Lewinson author archives » home news music film arts lifestyle dining calendar columns guides classifieds personals Copyright © 1995-2005 New Mass Media. All rights reserved. privacy | contact powered by Dispatch