Rebel without a cause

Hans Weingartner's film, one of the most successful to come out of Germany since Good Bye Lenin, starts marvellously. A wealthy middle-class family arrive back from holiday to find their house turned upside down. It looks like a burglary, yet nothing has been stolen or damaged. But scrawled on a wall are the words: "Your days of plenty are numbered

This is the work of The Edukators, a rebellious trio who may be too young to remember the radical youth movement of the Sixties, but are trying to do their bit to prove that the consumer society exploits more than it sustains. What you own, in other words, in fact owns you.

For the two young men of the group (Stipe Erceg's Peter and Daniel Br¸hl's Jan), it's a kind of poetic resistance. But for Jule (Julia Jentsch) it's more of a necessity, since she owes a hardhearted businessman 100,000 euros for crashing into his Mercedes without insurance. Peter loves Jule but Jan gradually inveigles himself into her affections. So it's a love story, too.

With Jan, Jule breaks into her businessman's house for one of their non-destructive sprees, only to be caught by his sudden return. When they call Peter to their aid he decides on kidnap. As the friends take their captive deep into the countryside, he starts to question their motives, saying that he, too, was a rebel in his youth.

Who will win the battle of wills?

Throughout, The Edukators relies largely on its actors. In Br¸hl and Jentsch, it has two who are now among the most notable in Europe. Br¸hl was last seen in Good Bye Lenin, as well as in Charles Dance's Ladies In Lavender. Jentsch won this year's Best Actress award at the Berlin Festival. The Croatian-born Erceg and Burghart Klaussner as the businessman are equally good.

But the film is arguably too soft, clearly on the side of the rebels but as puzzled as they are themselves about how to make their rebellion effective. It is no masterpiece, being rather long and a little discursive, but many will appreciate that it doesn't offer glib answers and states its case with sympathy and some wit.

The Edukators
Cert: 15