ScreenWize

The contemporary media like to paint a picture of terrorists as ‘other’, a picture designed to make us feel safer in our middle class suburban homes. These others are somehow different from us. In the comfort of middle-class Germany in the late 1960s, a terrorist organisation sprang up from the suburbs, its army the educated children of the middle classes. Uli Edel’s uncompromising film examines how this was possible. Beginning with newsreel and television clips that place us in the era – grim footage being fed back from Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X, Edel evokes the spirit of the age. Working from Stefan Aust’s book, his screenplay opens on the Shah of Iran’s 1967 visit to Berlin where well-fed and fashionably dressed students, smug in their political correctness, are protesting over the Shah’s treatment of his population.

Suddenly, those sympathetic to the Shah turn on the protesters, turning their placards into clubs and brutally beating them. Rather than helping the students, the police assist in beating, and in one instance killing, the students. As a viewer you are incensed, you want justice, and in this is the success of Edel’s terrific film. The Baader-Meinhof Complex manipulates your emotions, painting a wide and elaborate canvas with multiple perspectives, where you understand from an emotional level how these people might be provoked into action. From this incident springs a movement. We meet Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and boyfriend Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) who begin a series of retaliations against the state, and begin surrounding themselves with other young idealists. Only when respected journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedek) begins collaborating with them do they become a serious movement who will reign terror on the German state for a decade, and whose army will continue to fight after they are jailed and martyred.

The violence in Edel’s film serves a purpose, building in us the understanding that these people have lost control of their idealism, are morally compromised. I think this film would be a great place for parents to start a conversation with their children about violence and morality. Edel uses a variety of film stocks to match the patchiness of the vintage footage he weaves into his narrative, adding to the authentic feel. If he meanders off track at times, it is because there is much to cover here. This could easily have been a long and riveting mini-series. The performances he draws from his entire cast are terrific, but especially from his three leads, who are just mesmerising, and the cast are sumptuously costumed – a telling indicator that these urban terrorists might be more intrigued by the romance of the Bonnie-and-Clyde-ness of their lifestyle than their ideology would have us believe.

CK

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon