Baader Meinhof Complex [Blu-ray][Region A] [US Import]

I live around the corner from the scene of the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at the Deutsch Opera in Berlin in 1967. This film brings a history to me that I can't imagine. Like most British people, my main image of German history is of the pre-1945 era. Since then they have gone through the Cold War, which is what their own image of German history is clouded by, and also the student terrorism movement. It turned out that Ohnesorg's murder should be a film story in itself, now that the police officer who shot him turned out to be a Stasi agent working for East Germany. Getting back onto this review: This is a good film! But as with many reviews, the subtitles detract from it. I had to sit next to the TV to watch it... I was going ask a mate around to watch it. I'm glad I didn't, just because of the subtitles. Crazy that they ruined a great film by not thinking about subtitles size.

This is a fantastic retelling of Stefan Aust's book about the 1970's West German left wing group the Red Army Faction. The book itself is a fresh retelling of a time that many are aware of, but few are fully informed about - previous books tended towards bias to one side or the other, this at least gives a sense of balance.

This translates well in the film and although inevitably the rebellious RAF are more glamorous than the police they aren't portrayed as heroes, and much of your interpretation will be down to an individual point of view. Overall the film has an air of documentary and as it's based on actual events it can feel quite chaotic at times.

The acting is extremely good quality, in particular Martina Gedeck and Johanna Wokalek are sensational, the direction is effective in cutting between new and archive footage, and the budget on large scenes has been well spent, giving a feel of a big-budget action movie.

The screenplay brilliantly portrayed the way the mindset of the RAF developed as they became more and more convinced they were living in a police state. In spite of the violence and repression being depicted, I was reassured by the fact that such thought provoking films can and are being made for today's cinema audiences.

Highly recommended.

`The Baader Meinhof Complex' is an ambitious film, but it is not entirely clear just what those ambitions are. It covers a ten year period from the 1967 shooting of Benno Ohnesorg (the trigger for the extreme radicalisation of student protest in Germany at the time) through to the deaths of the first generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) and the murder of Hans-Martin Schleyer in 1977. The period is very well captured and the accuracy of the whole production is outstanding. No major event in the ten year `careers' of Baader, Enslin, Meinhof, Meins et al is omitted and they are presented in a stylishly directed film with some excellent set pieces. The performances of all the main characters are excellent and convincing as far as they go. It is clear that a staggering amount of research has gone into the realisation of the film, the sets are accurate to the nth degree and, where possible, original locations have been used; the references to well known documentary photographs from the time are neatly integrated without feeling simply clever or knowing. But, in a curious way the need to present so 'accurately' the sequence of events actually hijacks the film's core, leaving one uncertain exactly what the film is meant to be. Is it intended to be a description of what took place? Or is it a study in the psychology of people who allow ideology to drive them into extreme actions?

In trying to give a comprehensive account of events the film inevitably has to gloss over some of the more interesting questions raised by those events. The RAF were political radicals and politically motivated terrorists, yet the ideology that underpinned their actions is only hinted at as a generalised anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-American and anti-Israeli stance, and one never quite knows how much that ideology is actually driving them, nor what forms of coherence it claims to have. Certain of the membership were well versed in radical left theory and their praxis was derived from such theories, so it is surely a flaw in the film that one doesn't ever really know quite what they thought they were achieving (however deluded or unrealistic it may have been). But most seriously of all the psychological portraits of the protagonists are not sufficiently penetrating. I would have liked to have been given more sense of how they decided on their actions rather than simply what those actions were. It is only after they are arrested and locked up at Stammheim prison that one starts to get inside them as complex characters. Any one of the central characters is worthy of a film in their own right and perhaps that would make for a more successful project, for example: tracing the role of her religious upbringing in Gudrun Enslin's moral certainty and sense of martyrdom; examining Andreas Baader's troubled and delinquent adolescence and how his oppositional nature played out in his later actions; how exactly did the considerably older Ulrike Meinhof go from respectable journalist to underground terrorist (in the film it seems both too inevitable and too easy a move)? A more basic criticism is that the historical accuracy of the project results in a plethora of minor characters appearing and disappearing throughout the film; I doubt that anyone without a secure knowledge of the subject will know who many of them are or what they are doing there.

Nevertheless it is a valuable film and one that is well worth watching, raising as it does a number of important questions about idealism, ideology, radicalism and radicalisation. But it leaves space perhaps for more complex and nuanced exploration of those very issues. There is, of course, a danger that this film might come to stand as a definitive analysis of its subject and it would be a shame if it deterred other film makers from going there. In the end despite it being a long film I was left feeling that it was too short to do justice to its subject matter.