The Baader-Meinhof Complex (movie review)

I have a bit of an obsession with the militant left groups of the 1960s and 1970s, you know, the Black Panther Party, The Weather Underground, Democratic Students Union, Red Army Faction (RAF). Their histories, and their part in the overall development in the world we live in today, constitute a secret history of political will. But, it is nearly impossible to get an unbiased portrait of any of these groups, their politics, their motives, or their actions. You know of them as either Robin Hoods going out to right a wrong, or as a bunch of angry kids railing against a system that they don't quite understand.

Uli Edel's 2008 film Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex is a film that suffers from not being able to choose a side in the story. It could've been an attempt to be fair in the retelling of arguably the most successful leftist militant group of the era, but in the end it just comes off as empty and devoid specificity. On on hand you have Andreas Baader (played by Moritz Bleibtreu) and Ulrike Meinhof (played by Martina Gedeck), the ideological leaders of the Red Army Faction (though Ulrike Meinhof's leadership of the group can be debated, some say she was merely a hanger one who was accepted because of her newspaper columns and the real brains behind the operation was Gudrun Ensslin), and on the other, Bruno Ganz as Horst Herold, the investigator who is tasked with bringing the RAF to justice. Neither side is painted in any kind of light by the writers and the filmmakers. The matter-of-fact-ness of the film goes a long way of debunking the myth of the noble leftist militant.

But then again, it is very easy to debunk the RAF myth given that the founders of the RAF took their cues more from the films of Jean-luc Goddard and Marlon Brando than Mao's Little Red Book and Marx. As a whole, the ultraviolence of the assassinations, bombing, and kidnappings committed by the RAF have more to do with the worship of style over substance than they did an actual political theory. Sure they couched all of their manifestos in the language of the New Left, labor unions and Marx, but they still dressed like Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo when they went to bomb a department store. Real ideologues who who want to bring about the change they crave go to great lengths to become ascetics, to remove themselves from the world at large so that they can more readily commit violence to it; the student sycophancy of the RAF did not.

But what the film does well is show the ultimate dead-end of the RAFs politics. It shows, in a very subtle way, how the media began to paint the RAF not as a group committed to political change by any means necessary, but as terrorists who are a part of a larger international movement to change the western, democratic way of life. Of course, that is exactly what the RAF wanted to do, but their motives were not nihilistic in any way, in fact, they had a point, it's buried in the film, but it is there. They disliked the hypocrisy of the west, the failure of denazification in postwar Germany, and railed against American imperialism. If they would have gone against these societal shortcomings in a peaceful manner instead of kidnapping bank managers and killing cops, then they might have brought about some real change for the good. Instead they ended up bringing about the very fascist, militant, police state they thought they were already living in.

I know what you are saying, we don't live in a police state. But really, we do. But not because of some centralized, oppressive Gestapo. We live in a police state that was brought about through consumerism. The RAF were the first people brought low by the police through the use of computerized data sifting. The police did it by seeing who paid their bills in cash as opposed to bank drafts or cheques. In the end the RAF was brought down by the very consumerism that they despised. This is the one part of the film that is absolutely fascinating, after you get past the chic posturing the RAF members and their portrayal as dangerous, spoiled children (which I maintain that they were not), but ultimately goes nowhere. After all, this is a film about terrorists, not police. I would have liked to have seen more of Bruno Ganz and his character, and more time spent on the implications of the first generation RAF member's suicides while in custody.

All the performances, handcuffed as they are by preconceived notions, are solid, especially Bruno Ganz and Moritz Bleibtreu. Photographically, the film is very journeyman. It tries to take visual cues from Spielberg's Munich, but fails, and the editing seems to fast. There is very good production design and costuming, but in the end it merely supports a narrative that cannot make up its mind. But at the same time, the film manages to give us a portrait of the birth of the modern world, a world where the ultimate political statements are either not buying anything on Black Friday or killing yourself.