Molotov Memories.

Every documentary has a subject, but a good documentary also evinces a theme. The Weather Underground pursues those white student radicals of the 60s who split off from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to form a more desperate sect of bomb-planting revolutionaries. Their disgust with American policy during the Vietnam War was a particular expression of generational backlash. These former students were in a position to take issue with all the benefits of skin and caste they enjoyed. Acting upon their embarrassed self-awareness as fortunate whites, they felt, as one interviewee says, "a duty and an obligation" to overthrow what they clearly perceived as a "racist, genocidal, unjust" government. When the crazed dream disintegrated, and after years of hiding from the FBI, they came back to society as professors, local activists, virtually anonymous Americans. Filmmakers Sam Green and Bill Siegel cleverly pace the interviews with telephoto shots of crowds on streets and in corridors: Anywhere. Anyone. A totally successful re-integration.

It’s a story that has gone back underground. Today, it’s an almost forgotten history carrying an archaic sense that being young meant devotion to an idea and a passion for issues. But The Weather Underground is most interesting when forcing those old radicals into self-examination. They’re brought close to realizing that though times have changed, youthful recklessness has not. Mark Rudd admits mixed feelings: "Knowledge of the U.S.’s position in the world was too big. I still don’t know what to do with it." Some, like Naomi Jaffe and David Gilbert, haven’t entirely let go. Others remain embittered, like Bernardine Dohrn, now married to Bill Ayers and with two children. Dohrn still wears that "I have nothing to smile about" look on her face that she had when a young firebrand.

Now chagrined, they have some small understanding that their dangerous folly ("like a Children’s crusade gone mad") was an excess of privilege and timeless naivete. Some of this realization comes post 9/11. "When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things," says Brian Flanagan, compounding regret with wisdom. That’s what these students didn’t have three decades ago when they leaped into anarchy and violence, rash reflex responses to the political awakening of college years. (It’s the same root of silliness that gives Oliver Stone his mania about LBJ.)

As the filmmakers tote up the homeland bombing incidents and flash back to the Weathermen’s incendiary remarks mixed with whimsical effrontery, you can see that each of these young people swayed to the poetic echoes of To the Finland Station as much as to Bob Dylan (The Weathermen took their names from "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"). Yet they never thought beyond their reading—or their own excitement. Making history vied with making a hit record as the countercultural thing to do. The film barely explores the different rationales that distinguished the white radicals and black radicals—all they shared was impetuousness and a common national history. That’s why a black interviewee could reject the tactics of the Weathermen with the riposte "It’s Custeristic... They’re muddleheads and scatterbrains."

Mark Rudd is quoted: "I cherished my hate as moral superiority"—a confession of blistering honesty that conveys the heat of privileged activism. Something more was going on than kids acting on principle. And arrogance wasn’t just a trait of the dangerous ones. An SDS conservative, Todd Gitlin, is interviewed about the 1968 convention that saw the group splintered. He calls the Weathermen’s defection "piracy" and contemptuously dismisses their "Join us or fuck you" attitude. Gitlin gives away his own resentment as he "watch[ed] them run away with the student left," clearly angry about the stolen limelight and the weakened position, clearly pissed about the opposition—as if the "student left" was in itself a valorous elite.

Using privilege as a theme requires almost superhuman humility; the filmmakers must show that the worst behavior of the Weathermen is inherent in all youthful zealotry—especially when activism is not learned from the experience of hardship. As each interview harkens back to Vietnam as an all-purpose justification ("The Vietnam war made us all a little crazy"), the subjects demonstrate a hollow incentive. Not having earned the right to denounce American injustice, their "Bring the War Home" behavior seems based in presumption.

It’s almost comical to see privileged youth transform themselves into fighters—and ideologues. "To do nothing is violence," a young Dohrn insists, an overstated though heartfelt imitation of Black Panther rhetoric. Their commitment to "attack every single institution of American injustice" ratchets up the rarely admitted tension between working-class youth and college youth—those who do well to get along contrasting against those who are restless.

Yet the Weathermen’s restless madness touched on something basic: the necessity for people to proclaim their beliefs. They dared to challenge: "White youth must choose sides now. You’re either one of the oppressed or one of the oppressors." That only sounds simple; it’s a complicated truism you’ll never hear from Eminem.

The Weather Underground Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel

L’Auberge Espagnole

Lying naked in bed with a married woman, his cute little butt smiling vertically at the camera, Xavier (Romain Duris) the hero of L’Auberge Espagnole, represents France’s answer to the pampered youth of The Real Cancun. While studying European economics in Barcelona, Xavier is preparing for a job in the French ministry. Unfortunately, L’Auberge Espagnole only pretends to examine the character types that run the new Europe. It’s actually about Xavier enjoying himself like all French bourgeois movie heroes, and like his multiculti housemates from England, Germany, Scandanavia, Italy. If Duris resembles the young Tom Hanks, it’s because L’Auberge Espagnole is nothing more than Bachelor Party for Europe’s diplomatic class.

Director Cedric Klapisch borrows some sensibility from antecedents like Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (the affair) and The 400 Blows (the beach-front ending), but his superficiality is exposed in the early scene of Xavier’s job interview. Ignoring the experience of corporate life and existential mystery that was memorable in Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, Klapisch clutters such moments with fast-motion and quick-edited collages.

Klapisch’s style suggests the MTV generation’s new visual language (via digital apparatus) is more important than conveying social, political, personal essence. Visually it’s as animated and post-modern and cutting-edge as Amelie (Audrey Tautou plays the French girl Xavier leaves behind), but the hi-def camerawork, plus the digital editing (it’s over-Avid) lacks Amelie’s sentimental conviction. Xavier’s classmates never countenance the issue of immigration. No contemporary political issue ever crosses their minds. Xavier only applies his education to adultery and self-gratification. (He befriends a lesbian roommate who teaches him how to seduce women; meanwhile the dorm’s gay male character remains closeted.) It’s all Klapisch’s rad rationalization for modern Europe’s political insensibility.

The title refers to an ethnically mixed dish—a "Euro-pudding," one character says. It equally pertains to economic and class consolidation, a reality of the global satellite era. Xavier, the son of a hippie mother and capitalist father, is dismayed by the choices he faces. He undergoes a CAT scan that induces multilingual dislocation. Klapisch uses this sequence to show off more digital-era technology—a cultural development that both defines contemporary youth’s perception and inhibits comprehension. Maybe that’s why these clueless co-eds sit in a courtyard singing "No Woman No Cry" without a hint of irony. L’Auberge Espagnole is a new-style coming-of-age film that proudly inspires no reflection. Fittingly, its theme song is Radiohead’s "No Surprises."

L’Auberge Espagnole Directed by Cedric Klapisch