Smart and poignant, and that can be revolutionary

Hans Weingartner’s “The Edukators” is a situationist “Jules et Jim” for the antiglobalization set. A sweet, funny and gripping romantic adventure, it’s about the limitations of political activism in this day and age, and what happens when your girlfriend and your best friend fall in love.

A family of affluent Berliners returns home from vacation to find its dining room chairs piled in a pyramid, the stereo in the freezer and its reproduction of the Venus de Milo dangling from a noose in the hallway. Someone has left a note that reads, “Your days of plenty are numbered.” It’s signed “The Edukators.”

The scruffily adorable pups responsible for the job are Jan (Daniel Bruhl, “Goodbye Lenin”) and Peter (Stipe Erceg), a two-man movement whose aim it is, basically, to freak out the rich. (Their other standard missive: “You have too much money.”)

Brooding and intense, Jan stalks around his and Peter’s apartment glowering at Peter’s willowy girlfriend, Jule (Julia Jentsch), and moodily taking hits off his oxygen machine, which sits where the bong would have sat 40 years earlier. Jan believes that dope “dulls a young person’s revolutionary spirit,” but Peter doesn’t, really. Nor is he above swiping a Rolex while rearranging bourgeois knickknacks.

Jule, meanwhile, is in the dark about Peter’s secret activities, though she spends her free time in front of trendy sneaker stores protesting Indonesian sweatshop conditions. The rest of the time she works as a waitress in a high-end restaurant patronized by caricatures of rich people. When her landlord evicts her, we learn Jule has serious financial problems. She moves in with Peter just as he is about to go on a trip to Barcelona (it’s an affluent society, after all).

As Jan and Jule get to know each other better, Jan learns that Jule is more or less indentured to a fat cat whose Mercedes she totaled on the autobahn a couple of years earlier after letting her insurance expire. (In hock for almost $100,000, she can’t resist applying the occasional key to the nearest Mercedes.) Jule, in turn, discovers that Jan and Peter spend their evenings breaking into mansions and flushing figurines down the toilet. When it dawns on her that she and Jan have wandered onto the street where she sends her monthly checks, she begs Jan to let her in.

Things take several turns for the unexpected, and soon Jan, Jule and Peter find themselves with an unwanted abductee on their hands. The middle-aged Hardenberg (Burghart Klaussner) not only has a garage full of Mercedes attached to his lakefront villa, but -- as he tells the kids later (once they are well into their weeklong Tirolean idyll in a remote cabin) -- he was once a revolutionary, commune-dwelling member of the SDS himself.

While Jan, Jule and Peter mope and fret about what to do about “Hardi” (as Peter has taken to calling him) and about their relationships, the increasingly likable and laid-back Hardenberg treats his week in captivity like a vacation: cooking, getting stoned and reminiscing about the good old days when he was young and naive. In one scene, the kids agree to take him down to the village to use the phone. (His sofa is still in the pool since the night of Jan and Jule’s first visit, so he wants to tell the maid not to come.) When they come across a villager who looks at them curiously, Hardenberg covers for the kids, calling Jan his son and giving him a pat on the back.

The thing is, Jan, Jule and Peter could easily be Hardenberg’s kids. In fact, no doubt his own kids look, dress, talk and maybe even think just like his kidnappers. This is just one of the remarkably sharp and poignant ways in which Weingartner, who is neither naive about Jan, Jules and Peter’s politics, nor, as has been suggested, convinced that Hardenberg’s might makes right, sheds a clear light -- for the first time I can remember seeing in a movie -- on the uneasy relationship between baby boomers and their children.

It’s easy to dismiss the kids’ politics, as Hardenberg does, as the whim and privilege of the under-30 set. But then, when Hardenberg was their age, his parents were waxing nostalgic about the good old antiestablishment days in one breath and declaring the argument over in the next.

As Jan says to Jule in a wistful moment, “It was easy to be a rebel then. All you needed was long hair and some dope.” Now, he explains, you can buy all manner of revolutionary paraphernalia in a store. He has a point. Hardenberg fought the law and the law won, but not before he became it.

*

‘The Edukators’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Some nudity and profanity

A IFC Films release. Director Hans Weingartner. Producers Hans Weingartner, Antonin Svoboda. Screenplay Katharina Held, Hans Weingartner. Director of photography Matthias Schellenberg, Daniella Knapp. Editors Dirk Oetelshoven, Andreas Wodraschke. Costume designer Silvia Pernegger. Music Andreas Wodraschke. Production designer Christian M. Goldbeck. Running time: 2 hours, 6 minutes. In German with English subtitles.

In limited release.