The Baader Meinhof Complex (***1/2)

Neither apartment buildings nor a psychological condition is the subject of this drama. The title probably sounds better to German audiences, but something pithier like The Terrorists would have been better in translation. The RAF (Red Army Faction) were something like the Weather Underground, only the latter group targeted only buildings, whereas RAF didn’t mind killing its enemies, such as police and politicians they considered instruments of a corrupt state. Moreover, despite the violence, the RAF, unlike American radical groups, enjoyed a substantial level of support among the German youth who had grown up after the Nazi era.

The group grew out of the student movement of the 1960s. (See Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers for a very different look at the movement, in France.) The early sequence in which pro-Shah of Iran security forces and German police violently clash with peacefully protesting students feels as real as any riot scene I’ve seen, but the rest of the movie concentrates on violence committed by RAF members. The film more or less traces the history of the group from its origins in the 1960s student movement to the late 1970s.

Primary characters include two women. One is Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a leftist journalist who becomes radicalized upon witnessing police brutality and meeting Gudrun Esslin, a Mao-quoting firebrand who questioned the utility of words without deeds. Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu, of Run Lola Run and Munich), another RAF founder, was Esslin’s boyfriend. Esslin believed in drawing a thick line between friends and enemies and, as played by Johanna Wokalek, spends a good deal of the movie cursing the “pigs” and the capitalists and the American and German governments. The shrill rhetoric and general level of anger among the RAF members can become wearisome, but not dull. Esslin in particular is tremendously irritating, yet real, for which much credit must go to Wokalek.

Providing a calm counterpoint to the radicals, and welcome quieter cinematic interludes, are the scenes in which the government plans its counterstrategy. The film’s most recognizable actor, Bruno Ganz (Downfall’s Adolf Hitler), plays Horst Herold, head of the West German anti-terrorist force, Although the movie is no way polemical, when one of Herold‘s subordinates questions why Herold wants to understand what motivates the terrorists, it’s hard not to think of more recent differences of opinion on the same subject.

It’s also hard to tell what sort of a society the RAF would have wanted to create had they succeeded in defeating those they called imperialists, but the film presents a good view of their general worldview and the differences of opinion between somewhat more practical members like Meinhof, and less-cautious ones like Esslin. Neither overly bogged down in detail nor dumbed down, this brilliant German film clearly deserved its foreign-language film Oscar nomination and will appeal to those who like films such as Munich, thoughtful real-life thrillers. Despite the 2:30 length of the film and unfamiliarity of the subject matter to me, it was neither slow nor confusing. However, if the plotters in Munich were merely morally suspect, those here present the paradox of incredibly passionate people who might seem admirable had they applied that passion via less-appalling methods.

IMDB link

viewed 9/23/09 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/23–24/09