The international title of this film is “The Edukators” which also is the title of a film in the making, a remake? We get to know two lifelong friends, Peter and Jan, radical leftwing activists who have come up with an original form of action. A third element to the film is Jule, Peter’s girlfriend, for a while… Jule is not supposed to know what the friends do at night, but at some point she does. Having to improvise when things go wrong, the high speed of the film drops drastically and the focus goes more to the ideas of the young men. Ideals prove to be very fluid. “The fat years are over” is a nice film with some nice humour and a nice peek into the minds of young anticapitalists. The first half of the film is very good, the second half alright. Weingartner obviously wanted to give some criticism to the system that we live in, but he is fair enough to show the difficulties of too radical ideas.
