PATC review: The Baader Meinhof Complex

SH November 18, 2008, 9:58 am

The Baader Meinhof Complex – 18

Violent and frequently intense study of the Red Army Faction, the left-
wing terrorist organisation founded by Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu),
Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) in
West Germany in the late 1960s.

The director is Uli Edel, who in the early 90s was responsible for one of
Madonna’s more appalling performances in the “erotic thriller” Body of
Evidence. Happily this one does not feature the Queen of Pop doing
anything painful with candle wax, but does include innumerable action
scenes in which terrorists and Polizei shoot at each other with
fastidioushistorical detail. According to Edel, if you were to sit and
count the number of gunshots in each sequence then it would precisely
match the contemporary police reports. Seriously.

The problem with the film, which stylistically is hard to fault and is on
the whole very well-acted, is that a conscious decision has been made
merely to depict the actions of the RAF, and not to explain the logic or
motives behind every bank robbery or assassination. The film never
explains why the political debate turned militant, it just shows the
consequences. It’s a non-judgemental approach, but from an audience’s
point of view what it inevitably means is that if you don’t happen
already to know a great deal about the subject then you’ll come out of
the (very long) film absolutely none the wiser about what made this
particular group tick.

By film critic Matthew Perry