Teacher’s Willing Executioners A Tale of Fascism’s Appeal Has the Power to Chill, Says Alison Rowat Review Film of the Week

By Alison Rowat

4 stars

THE WAVE (15) Dir: Dennis Gansel With: Jurgen Vogel, Jennifer Ulrich, Frederick Lau Dennis Gansel’s classroom-set piece doesn’t politely request your attention. In showing how an experiment to teach children about Nazism unravels it chucks a pen at your head, screams till it is scarlet in the face, and finally sends you reeling across the room. If that makes it sound like something best avoided, think again. This riveting picture, a kind of Tom Brownshirt’s Schooldays, is political drama at its brutal best.

Like a message in a bottle, the original story behind The Wave has traversed oceans, time, and media. The details remain sketchy, but the basics are that in 1967, in a school in Palo Alto, California, a teacher by the name of Ron Jones was searching for a way to make his pupils understand not just the “why” behind the rise of fascism, but the practical “how”. In a psychological experiment he dubbed The Third Wave, Jones showed how the mob, with enough determination and encouragement, could become the tools of dictators. The story of this exercise in brainwashing for beginners, demagoguery for dummies, was used as the basis for an Emmy award winning television movie, a bestselling teen novel by Todd Strasser, and several plays.

Gansel’s version is controversial in that it sets the story in a German school. The 35-year-old, Hanover-born director dealt previously with his country’s past in 2004′s Before the Fall, but The Wave is set unmistakably in the present. The pupils in Herr Wegner’s class are fourth generation Germans, the “never again” children supposedly steeped in the ways of tolerance, liberalism and democracy. To explore the truth of that assumption is a daring move by Gansel, yet one that, judging by the film’s success in Germany, was the right one.

Wegner, played by Jurgen Vogel, is pegged from the off as the kind of achingly trendy sir who wants to be seen as the equal of his pupils rather than their master. By his jeans, leather jacket and Clash T-shirt shall ye know him. Wegner thinks he is to teach a class on anarchy, a subject which appeals to his image of himself as a rebel without a pause. When the headmaster tells him to do autocracy instead, Wegner feels suitably, and comically, oppressed.

His fears that the subject will seem about as relevant to his pupils as what the Kaiser had for breakfast in 1817 are soon confirmed. “Not that stuff again, ” sighs a pupil when the Third Reich is mentioned. Realising that he has to be a man of action rather than lecture notes if he is to get these teenagers interested, Wegner sets about turning his class into a cadre who call themselves “the wave”.

Gansel has the transformation happen at astonishing speed, the pace reflecting the sense of giddiness, of events rushing out of control, that the pupils are experiencing. From the election of Wegner as leader, to the adoption of a uniform (a white shirt) and the coining of slogans, the process is made to appear inexorable.

Although the speed of the conversion is at first hard to credit, the most disturbing element of the tale is how plausible it becomes. The class is a microcosm of society, with leaders and followers, sceptics and believers. Like all cults, the wave promises to give its members what is missing in their lives. Some pupils see in it the traditional family they long for, others enjoy the power of being part of a gang, still more see conforming as the ultimate rebellion.

As the female and Turkish members show, the wave is not exclusively a white or a male thing. Anyone can be part of this gang, as long as they leave their individualism at the door.

Gansel, who wrote the screenplay with Peter Thorwarth from Strasser’s novel, can be heavy handed at times, making connections between past and present that would strike a five year old as too obvious. Wegner, for instance, has a chip on his shoulder about going to community college, making him a closet inadequate along the lines of a certain failed artist from Austria.

Whether a group of otherwise savvy teenagers would adopt a salute as naff as the wave’s is another iffy proposition. Yet it’s Gansel’s determination to work in bold strokes that makes his picture work. He steamrollers the audience in the way that Wegner overcomes his class.

Having managed to keep the tension on a steady hum for so long, Gansel provides an electrifying ending worthy of the tale and the cast’s efforts. While the camera has naturally devoted most of its attention to the charismatic Vogel, this is an ensemble piece with young actors who throw themselves into the drama as if they too are caught up in something too big, too powerful, to resist.

As history teachers everywhere will be heartened to see, the cold hand of the past can still exert a fearsome grip, much like Gansel’s picture.

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

(c) 2008 Herald, The; Glasgow (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.