The Edukators (2005)

TEACHING BIG BUSINESS A LESSON, ONE A brooding Bruhl

When you see young lefties on the streets, lashing out at globalization and the WTO, it's easy to feel that their passion and wrath are matched by their self-righteous naÏveté. The Edukators, a fluid and gripping drama from Germany (it has the design of a thriller and the mood of a spontaneous, whirling-camera character study), is the first film to anatomize the contradictions of the rage-against-the-machine generation. In Berlin, a trio of youthful activists, all attractive in a glamorously unbathed sort of way, break into posh villas and rearrange the furniture, Manson-family style, leaving notes that say things like ''Your days of plenty are numbered.'' Director Hans Weingartner sees these scowling baby Marxists for what they are: middle-class wastrels who've inflated a valid critique of the system into a tantrum. When they kidnap a pleasantly stuffy businessman (Burghart Klaussner) who turns out to be a former '60s radical, it's too pat an irony, yet the duel of wits between the wised-up fat cat and his ardent revolutionary captors makes for a forceful inventory of our political climate: stormy and urgent, with gusts of hot air.