How
fitting that The Edukators, a film about three idealistic Germans who
concoct witty and guileful ways to rage against the political system,
is hitting British cinema screens right in the middle of this
singularly dismal election campaign. It's an antidote to the endless
parade of shiny-suited, fake-smiled, cliché-spouting robotniks who
lurch and photo-op around on the nightly news. Where are the visions,
the charismatic showmen, the mighty phrases that might sum up and give
voice to our collective hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow? Who
indeed has the boldness to even talk about a better tomorrow?
Lessons in love and politics: Jan and Jule
The young trio at the heart of The Edukators are similarly enraged
about the torpid status quo. Jule (Julia Jentsch) is a would-be teacher
who once harboured an ambition "to live wild and free", but finds
herself being harried by the snooty customers at the restaurant where
she waitresses in order to pay off the 100,000 euros she owes to a
businessman whose Merc she totalled. The job feeds her keen sense of
injustice and she spends her free time demonstrating against sweatshop
exploitation.
Her boyfriend Peter (Stipe Erceg)
is, with his pal Jan (Daniel Bruhl), part of a two-man underground sect
called The Edukators. Forgoing the bloodier strategies of like-minded
factions of the 1970s, they opt for a more oblique campaign that
involves unsettling rather than bombing their victims. They break into
the houses of the rich in order to rearrange their furniture into
unstable pyramids and leave on the walls the message: "Your days of
plenty are numbered."
Things get complicated when
Peter goes abroad for a short trip and Jan and Jule start hanging out
together. She's taken by his off-kilter charm and the ferocity with
which he tells her to jack in her degrading job. They break into
another home only to discover that it belongs to Hardenberg (Burghart
Klausssner), the businessman she's been working extra hours to pay off.
When he returns unexpectedly, they panic and attack him, before
enlisting Peter's help to take him hostage in a remote mountainous
cottage.
The film, directed by first-timer Hans
Weingartner, who co-wrote the script with Katharina Held, is a
near-perfect bend of ideas and heist-gone-wrong action, warmth and
angry satire, the personal and the political. The relationship between
Hardenberg and the trio is never merely that of captive and captors,
industrialist lackey and righteous revolutionaries; it turns out that
he too had been a dope-smoking insurrectionary, at the end of the
1960s. The dynamics of their kidnap-house keep shifting so that a kind
of mutual dependence - or complicity - emerges between them.
The fluctuating ties between the trio are equally gripping. They're an
attractive gang: Bruhl, who starred in the break-out hit Good Bye!
Lenin, has, despite his angry eyes and introverted manner, an engaging
boyishness; Erceg has cheekbones that could saw through titanium and an
air of tousled genius that suggests he'd be at home playing squiggly
electro-noises on stage with Radiohead; Jentsch has a scratchy beauty
and ray of diffidence.
What makes the characters
most glamorous is not their looks but their scuffed fieriness. They
don't resemble swivel-eyed ideologues, but ordinary young people racked
by an entirely logical sense of anguish about the unfairness of the
world they inhabit. How great it is to see a film about this
demographic that doesn't portray them as slackers or stoners. How great
it is to see people stage impassioned, ardent debates about whether
those of us in the West are living in democracies or in capitalist
dictatorships.
There's a tremendous speech in
which Jan upbraids his pro-commerce captive: "Mental illness is rising.
Serial killers, shattered souls, senseless violence. You can't sedate
the people with game shows and shopping. The antidepressants won't work
forever."
The Edukators is the latest of a recent
spate of films such as the The Yes Men and The Corporation which set
out to anatomise the techniques used by big business to reprogramme and
desensitise their consumers. Like them, it's a relatively low-budget
film, shot using hand-held digital cameras, that endorses hacking,
infiltration and cultural activism. Unlike them, it's primarily a
drama, and one that that is deeply involving, not least when the sexual
dynamics of the trio threaten to put paid to their kidnapping plans.
The Edukators is also just one of a whole clutch of movies - among them
The Idiots, Together, The Dreamers and The Barbarian Invasions - that
rake over the legacy of the post-1968 youthquake movements. Sex,
revolt, political struggle: it's easy to see the appeal of those times
for contemporary film makers, even when what they're focussing on is
the decline of dissent.
Why have so few of our
directors done the same? Maybe the British Left is seen as too dowdy
and provincial. And maybe the theatrical traditions that weigh so
heavily on our national cinema means that our approach to history films
tends to veer towards costume drama. Whatever, The Edukators, so
charming and so provocative, and with a pay-off that will have you
punching the air with delight, shows us what we're missing.
Another European ménage a trois is to be found in Sebastien Lifshitz's
Wild Side. Its title seems to promise a series of no-holds-barred,
living-on-the-edge, subcultural antics. Actually, it's a thoughtful and
rather sombre account of a family of outsiders, three drifting souls in
present-day Paris who struggle to create a new and unorthodox design
for living; a transsexual prostitute, a French-Arab hustler who turns
tricks in railway-station toilets, a lonely Russian waiter.
The film is a kind of reckoning. At its heart is the return made by
transsexual Stephanie (Stephanie Michelini) to the world she (though at
the time she was a teenager called Pierre) left behind seventeen years
earlier. We see her revisiting the teasings and the beatings, her
confusion and desperation, the mother from whom she was estranged but
who, old and sick, she has now gone back to nurse.
Wild Side quotes Jules et Jim on several occasions, but it lacks that
film's flashes of tumbledown levity. It's better at avoiding being a
certain kind of (theatrical, over-emotional) queer movie than at
actually realising its own personal aesthetic. Nonetheless, crisply
photographed by Agnes Godard (Beau Travail, The Dreamlife of Angels),
it has a subtle, pellucid score by Jocelyn Pook and opens with a
ravishing, stripped-down version of I Fell In Love With A Dead Boy by
Antony and the Johnsons. For those reasons alone, it stays with you
long after it's over.