The Edukators hits the ground running with a well-to-do family arriving home to find they've been targeted by politically motivated intruders. This leads in neatly to the trio of young revolutionaries behind it plotting a bigger statement: to kidnap a businessman who, in their eyes, embodies the fat cats of the world by being indirectly responsible for the crippling debt under which one of them labours.German cinema's everyboy of the decade Daniel Brühl, Julia Jentsch and Stipe Erceg make for an engagingly naive band, who get stumped by the effortless arguments of their captive, and completely fail to see their imminent ménage à trois until they're stuck with it. The space and clarity of the mountain-meadow Austrian setting of their hideout and the deceptively naturalistic photography work in concert to accentuate and lay bare the rawness of their convictions.
The story may be closely tied to the Red Army Faction-tinged anti-capitalist movements that have lingered in the background of German society since the war, but it has real universal application in its cool assessment of idealism against reality; the untested principles of youth worn down by the lures and obligations through the years. However, I'd advise against Weingartner, who's now in the process of remaking his own work for Hollywood, drawing any flippant ironic parallels between these themes and what he's actually doing. And then to drop it, pronto: does anyone remember George Sluizer?
8/10
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