THE WAVE/DIE WELLE

IN THE Wild One, the biker played by Marlon Brando was asked what he was rebelling against."What have you got?" he replied.

There's an echo of that line in this German high school drama, when a student asks, "What is there left to rebel against today?" Dennis Gansel's heavy-handed film purports to be a cautionary tale on mob rule and what happens when individuality is sacrificed for uniformity.

The opening titles state that The Waveis "based on a true story", which was an experiment at a California high school in 1967. In this updated transposition of that story to Germany, Jürgen Vogel plays Rainer Venger, a teacher whose liberal heart is not just on his sleeve but signalled by his collection of Ramones and Clash T-shirts.

It's project week at the school, and Venger is miffed when he's not allowed to take anarchy as his class subject. Instead, he's assigned to address autocracy. References to the Third Reich prompt yawns from the students, and when one says that a dictatorship couldn't happen in Germany today, the teacher sets out to prove him wrong.

This is all too easily and implausibly achieved through the juvenile behaviour of the students. One of them, the insecure class geek, predictably flips his lid with violent consequences. The response of the adults, among them Venger's wife and other teachers, is as exaggerated as the enthusiasm with which the easily susceptible students apply themselves to the project.

With most of the movie taking place in a classroom, The Wavehas the feel of an unimaginatively filmed play (some token scenes of water polo games are added for visual relief). There is no visual relief in the subtitling, which is of the poorest quality in years, and it doesn't help that the students wear white shirts for much of this superficial, didactic picture.