Movies: The Edukators

The “Edukators” of the title are a cadre of two, Jan (Daniel Brühl) and Peter (Stipe Erceg), who repair alarm systems and use a yacht club’s membership list to derive a series of victims. They know how to get into their target’s houses, disable security in under thirty seconds, stack all the chairs in a giant pyramid in the living room and leave without a trace. There’s also a third, Peter’s girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch), bussing tables for a living and now shacking up with Peter and Jan after having been evicted from her apartment. She has no idea what Jan and Peter do after dark; like many others, she assumes they simply hand out flyers and agitate in front of stores that use dirt-cheap Third World labor. Jan is the more genuinely idealistic of the two; Peter is slightly more cynical, and doesn’t see anything wrong with things like occasionally pinching a €5,000 wristwatch from someone’s house. They all have too much money anyway, right?

Jule’s own secret, which comes out before theirs does, is her debt. She was responsible for a car accident a few years ago, and due to not being insured she’s now paying off the cost of the other guy’s car — a €90,000 luxury item, which she will probably need to spend the better part of ten years as a teacher to cover. She’s acutely aware it’s her fault, and she feels about as bad for the other guy, money aside, as she does for herself. But her compassion is offset by her being a bit of a compulsive risk-taker, and the way the movie gradually slots in this observation is one of its best qualities: she drinks and parties and smokes a little too freely, and when she finds out that Jan and Peter are the Edukators, her response is to lead them to the house of the man whose car she wrecked. He’s on their list.

This is where a whole slew of things begin to germinate at once. She and Jan have already begin to drift closer together (made all the easier while Peter is in Barcelona hatching another piece of anti-globalism sabotage), and by the time they break into the man’s house and begin running wild they’re quite in love. Then the owner, Hardenberg (Burghart Klaußner) shows up, and everything goes wrong all at once — he’s seen their faces, so they have to tie him up. Maybe hold him hostage. No, kidnap him and take him to a country cabin owned by Jule’s uncle, and then figure out what to do. This was where my expectations plunged, and I feared the movie — thus far smart and observant and amazingly well-written — would become one of those dreadful thrillers where the heroes scream demands at the police while holding guns to people’s heads.

Nothing of the kind happens, thankfully. The Edukators stays on course all the way through to the end, thanks to excellent performances all around — Brühl and Klaußner were both in Good Bye, Lenin! — and an almost offhand, pseudo-documentary style of direction by Hans Weingartner. He gives everyone in the film the kind of freedom of speech and thought that almost never surfaces in an American movie. There’s all the usual rhetoric mouthed about the costs of capitalism, but because the characters have been delineated as people first and not as bullhorns for a preconceived viewpoint, it is illuminating instead of doctrinaire. They want to “do the right thing” — who doesn’t? — but, as always, the right thing lies buried in such a thicket of messy human desires and compromises that by the time they reach it, it’s not what it seemed to be.

The biggest surprise comes when Hardenberg, the captive, speaks in his own defense. He’s not a coward or a pig, but a gentle, reasonable man with a family and a livelihood that he’s worked very hard to uphold, and he rather startles the other three when he admits that he was once himself about as radical as they were. So how did he end up in a mansion with three cars? Not all at once, he admits, and he has a wonderful speech where he describes how he started by wanting something better than his beat-up Volvo to drive around in, and ended up in the voting booth pulling the lever marked “Conservative”. He feels badly for them, these kids who want to do something to change their world, but are stuck thrashing around in a cesspool of warmed-over Marx and second-hand Che Guevara.

When I was in high school, I had a history teacher who spoke glumly of his experiences during the campus revolts of the Sixties. It was a mess, he insisted; it was a bunch of hotheads running around and jumping on the bandwagon do jour and wrecking everything, and what few sober, well-intentioned people there were in such a scene trying to get things done for the good of all were drowned out by all the rabble-rousers. He just wanted to do his job and teach history, and in his mind that was more of a genuinely revolutionary act than barricading any number of administrative buildings. The Edukators was made by people who understand these things from the inside out.