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GERMAN | 127 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE Video images flicker under the opening credits of Austrian director Hans Weingartner’s second feature, security-camera documents that political pranksters Jan (Daniel Brühl of Good Bye, Lenin!) and Peter (Stipe Erceg) have left for their bourgeois victims. No thieves, they break into the villas of wealthy vacationers to rearrange furniture and leave a note — "Your days of plenty are numbered" — that they sign "The Edukators." Unsightly video continues, but not all is ugly; Peter’s girlfriend, Jule (Julia Jentsch), enters the group. Truffaut-ites might sense a triangle (Jule und Jan?) forming, but Peter remains clueless, even after the trio are forced to take a hostage in a noirish twist that drives the film’s didactic final third as their cagy captive is revealed as a former student activist. (Or is he?) Back then, "all it took was dope and long hair." Now, oxygen tanks replace the bongs. Breathe easy, young radicals.
BY BRETT MICHEL
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