"If you throw one stone, it's punishable offense. If 1000 stones are thrown, it's political action."
Once upon a revolution, lefty journalist-turned-terrorist Ulrike Meinhof typed those words as an observation of the thin (perhaps in her mind non-existent) border between crime and campaign. It's a border that The Baader Meinhof Complex continually approaches, trespasses, and dallies around. As the chips fall one by one, we're left wondering just what these characters are truly after. Is it the radical change so often invoked by the youths of that generation, or is it just the intoxicating rush of the outlaw lifestyle?
The film traces a decade in Germany when the notorious Red Army Faction was at their peak in headline-grabbing, from their pre-formation in 1967 to the 1977 symbolic death of the group, marked by literal ones. In those ten years, the group butchered many law enforcement and political figures in cold blood, insistant in maintaining that they never hurt civilians. They also extorted, bombed, robbed, kidnapped and lawyered their way to ideological superiority.
Despite the barrage of historical data streaking across the screen as fast as machine-gun fire, the film isn't too concerned with exploring the ideological troubles that caused all this violence in the first place, shortchanging a reflection for the blinding glare of swift dramatization. The most interesting parts of the film are in the beginning: we see how a collection of student activists, unjustly beaten by authorities in a peaceful protest-turned-riot, begin to mobilize a counter-attack. Revolution crawls out of different things, be it self-defense against violence (another scene shows a right-winger gunning down lefty Rudi Dutschke, provoking a change), the urge for rebellion that's coupled with sexual revolution, or—as we see in Ulrike Meinhof—the hard disconnect between the life she's living and the words she's printing.
Meinhof devolves, quite easily, from a journalist with something to say to a stuttering cliche whose vocabulary begins and ends with "capitalist pig." You can hear the dead-end approaching in the RAF's rhetoric when they talk politics (which, oddly enough, the film doesn't show that often), but the film never explicitly outs them as phonies, which makes it all the more fascinating. A very tricky balance that the actors aced here, is how genuine these characters are when they're rousing among their own, but impotent where their words count. A telling sequence has the group at odds with the discipline and seriousness of the Palestinian rebels the RAF claim to be comrades with.
The attractiveness of the cast and the depiction of the group's sex-and-drugs laden party-hard-rock-star behavior obviously makes them seem more appealing and cinematically irresistible than their rigid police state opposition, but it at the same time acts as a strike against their credibility.
If anything, perhaps, the film shows that political movements, especially those radical enough to fit the term terrorists, are never entirely motivated by political ideology alone. Frustration is perhaps the most common instigator. Frustration over home life, parents, or a rock star dream that never was.
DVD Bonus Features
The DVD comes with an extra disc with over 2 hours of documentation of how the film came to be the way it is. Director Uli Edel and producer/screenwriter talk at length about their commitment to the film's historical accuracy, down to minute details. There's even a 20-minute featurette called "On Authenticity" dedicated to it. With historical dramas, stuff like this are expected with the home entertainment release, usually to defend the discrepancies. In this case, it's almost like they're bragging about how far they'd researched the events, which does nothing to assure us that there's an actual heart and story in the film as opposed to a series of recreations.
Not entirely so—there are some poignant character moments—but enough to make one wonder if this film was driven by an idea or an exercise.
"The Baader Meinhof Complex" is on sale March 30, 2010 and is rated R. Drama. Directed by Uli Edel. Written by Stefan Aust (book), Uli Edel. Starring Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Nadja Uhl.
