The terrorist action film genre is unlikely to take off.
Everything in the ’60s was sex. Music? Sex. Fashion? Sex. Cinema? Sex. Terrorism? Sex.
No, really; just ask Uli Edel. These days terrorism has an image problem – it’s all shapeless kaftans and granddad beards. But as Edel is at pains to point out in The Baader Meinhof Complex, back in the '60s, terrorists were hot.
The women wore mini skirts and sunbathed naked, while the guys smoked exotic cigarettes and had excellent hair. The epitome of revolutionary chic was Germany’s Red Army Faction, led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who led a life of photogenic anarchy while sticking it to The Man.
Edel’s film has been controversial domestically, and rightly so. Though running close to a bloated three hours, The Baader Meinhof Complex is a superficial romp that never asks any penetrating questions of its subjects while lavishing all kinds of love on the bank jobs, kidnappings and assassinations that brought them to notoriety.
Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), along with accomplices recruited exclusively from the sexiest echelons of Germany’s radical underbelly (including Alexandra Maria Lara and Johanna Wokalek), believed that the country had lost its way. Against a backdrop of the Vietnam War, Palestinian terrorism and Parisian riots, they were prepared to use violence to change its course.
But instead of questioning the legitimacy of armed resistance (something that could have made the film more relevant, if no less sensitive), Edel prefers to linger on its ways and means – the Libyan training camp, the internal politics, the Bonnie and Clyde-style mythologising – all of which takes him down a narrative cul-de-sac from which he never escapes.
And he’s a hypocrite. Referring to the dramatic camerawork of the film’s many shoot outs, Edel claims that he got low down and dirty to show the true cost of the RAF’s extremism. But he takes an all-too-obvious pleasure in the aesthetic effects of violence – blood spattered lenses and all.
The group’s key figures were eventually arrested and put on trial – a move which caused a sensation in Germany, and an upsurge in terrorist attacks around the world. But again, instead of examining the intellectual and moral context in which this takes place, we’re simply treated to a reductive melodrama inside the prison walls.
Perhaps the most pertinent question to ask yourself is this: if Edel was making a film about ETA or the IRA or Al Qaeda, could he get away with the shamelessness that permeates this film? The answer is no; no matter how sexy it turned out to be.
A dispatch from a troubled time with a great cast. Looking good.
Long. Tedious. Not insightful. But man, those terrorist chicks are hot!
The terrorist action film genre is unlikely to take off.
