[2 articles] Baader Meinhof Complex a taut, tense look at terrorists
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/arts/stories/2009/10/23/baader.html?sid=101 Friday, October 23, 2009 By Manhola Dargis The Baader Meinhof Complex, a taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film about a West German terrorist group whose founders ran bloodily amok in the 1970s, opens with a bright, sparkling image of children playing on a beach. It's 1967, and two of the children are the twin daughters of Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a respected journalist who one day jumped out of a window while helping a prisoner, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), escape. The moment she jumped, Meinhof left her world behind for a life of revolutionary zealotry and nihilistic violence. She traded her typewriter for a gun, her children too. What spurred Meinhof to leap into the void? That question haunts The Baader Meinhof Complex," which Bernd Eichinger adapted from Stefan Aust's book of the same title. For the most part, relying heavily on the historical record, Mr. Eichinger lets the group do its own talking, as does the film's director, Uli Edel, who gives it the pulse and music of a thriller. (The propulsive score echoes those of the "Bourne" movies.) Written in information-packed bursts, Aust's book owes much of its power to its exacting detail and to his familiarity with the group, which self-importantly labeled itself the Red Army Faction. A journalist, he wrote for the leftist newspaper co-founded by Meinhof's husband, for which she was a columnist and had extolled the "progressive" virtues of arson. Aust, who shows up at the edges of the film, played by Volker Bruch, helped rescue her children, whom she had handed off to minders while she was on the run. Ceding to pressure from the group, she had agreed that the girls could be taken to a Palestinian orphanage in Jordan where, Aust writes, they were to be raised as guerrillas. The members of the faction might have been lousy parents but they were committed to not repeating the sins of their own fathers and mothers. "I really see no difference left," Meinhof wrote before the faction formed, "between the police terrorist methods we have already seen in Berlin, and that threaten us now, and the terrorism of the SA" - the Nazi Sturmabteilung or storm troopers - "in the 1930s." For the Red Army Faction the enemies included American imperialism and what it saw as an emerging West German police state: in May 1972 it bombed a police station, a newspaper and several United States Army sites. It also set off a bomb inside a Volkswagen owned by a judge. That morning, however, it was his wife who turned the ignition key. She lived. The filmmakers lay out the historical and political context in which the faction took root - in an early scene the police beat unarmed demonstrators protesting a visit by the shah of Iran and his wife - but they don't try to dig deeply into the heads of the group's individual members. Meinhof, played by Gedeck as something of a mouse itching to roar, doesn't come off as an obvious guerrilla. In one scene, though, you see the woman she was and her tremors of discontent. It's early still, before her great leap, and she's in her backyard with friends, dancing and laughing and mingling. Her husband quiets the crowd and asks Meinhof to read her latest column, which has been reprinted on a flier. Casting shy smiles at the partyers, she reads a passionate open letter of protest to the shah's wife, ticking off various outrages, including the torture of Iranian dissidents. As she finishes reading, the film cuts to a long shot that frames Meinhof against the large, stately middle-class house she will soon abandon. "You're the ultimate bourgeois sow!" Baader once yelled at Meinhof, an insult that, to judge from her relatively passive reaction in the film, she absorbed into her being. Terror takes different forms. And Baader, who continually lashes out at the women in the group - his zealot girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, played by Johanna Wokalek, is as much his baby sitter as lover - was a tyrant. Opportunism rather than ideology seemed to drive him, as shown in the very funny, borderline surreal sequence in Jordan, where the faction had gone to train with a Palestinian group. Baader, in his tight velvet pants, didn't take to the rigorous drills, and the Palestinians, offended by the women's nude sunbathing, didn't take to their visitors either. These sunbathing tourists became professional guerrillas soon enough back home, where, by 1977, they and successive iterations of the faction ended up killing almost 30 people. In the end the Red Army Faction attracted extraordinary sympathy throughout West Germany along with true-believers who formed new generations of the group even as the founders languished in prison. The group's members, who feared a police state and whose actions only brought the government's fist down harder, were players in a real-life thriller that turned into a national tragedy. Theirs is a terrible, mesmerizing story of curdled idealism, one that has been told before but rarely as well. The faction is gone now (it disbanded in 1998), but its legacy still burns. -------- Review: "The Baader Meinhof Complex" http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09295/1007296-120.stm Gritty Docudrama chronicles the rise and fall of the RAF in West Germany October 22, 2009 By Barry Paris If Germany's World War II wounds are still festering today (which they are), imagine how much fresher they were in 1967 -- especially in the minds of its first post-Nazi generation, determined to thwart what many of them perceived as "the new face of fascism" in their divided country. No need to imagine. Director Uli Edel reimagines it for us in bloodcurdling -- and bloodletting -- fashion with "The Baader Meinhof Complex," a tough docudrama depicting the rise and fall of RAF (Red Army Faction), the home-grown radical group whose bombings, kidnappings and hijackings rocked West Germany for a decade. As genres go, it has pretty much everything: action, thrills, crime, cops, romance, history -- and a plethora of biography. Central figure Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) are free-lover radicals, provoked by the Vietnam War and the attempted murder of a prominent left-winger into leading a violent fight against American imperialism and the German capitalist establishment. "This time, we won't sit by idly and watch fascism develop," declares Baader, whose revolutionary fervor calls for a new morality to go with a new politics. "Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together!" So does a certain misogyny on his part, complicated when prominent journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) enters their tight-knit cell. In the film's opening nude beach scene, Meinhof establishes her "ultra-liberal" credentials. She and the others are further radicalized by the Shah of Iran's 1967 visit to Germany, the brutal police suppression of protests and the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War. Ulrike, increasingly coming to share the belief that "talk without action is wrong," is the film's most enigmatic figure. At first just a spokesperson for the extremists, she soon leaves her husband and children to join the movement as an active participant. On the other side of the law stands Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz), West Germany's top law enforcement official -- the one man who "understands" them. As the film's unifying character of sorts, he argues that brutal police tactics are counterproductive and that -- like Sherlock Holmes -- you have to penetrate the criminals' thought processes. Director Uli Edel is objective even with his biases, if that's oxymoronically possible. His clear sympathy for Meinhof and certain of her colleagues (excluding Baader) is influenced -- like she is -- by her motivational meetings with people willing to take action instead of just jawboning for a better world. In one of the picture's best scenes, when she helps Baader escape incarceration, her last-second jump from a window sill is a powerful metaphor for her jump to extremism. But Edel's apparent initial sympathy with the extremists' goals slowly evaporates with their murderous tactics. At first split over how violent to be, killing soon becomes acceptable to the radicals, whom Edel portrays as increasingly more criminal than political. Meanwhile, Ganz's Herold character suggests the government was a model of moderation -- not exactly true. In fact, Herold did nothing to challenge the German people's postwar complacency and American complicity, succeeding in his relentless pursuit of the young terrorists while acknowledging they were just the tip of an iceberg. Nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar (which it lost to Japan's "Departures"), "Baader-Meinhof" is as impressive in its period recreation as Edel's "Last Exit to Brooklyn" (1989). The screenplay, based on Stefan Aust's book, is by Edel and Bernd Eichinger, who wrote the terrific "Downfall" (2004), about Hitler's last bunker days. Ganz is as superb here as he was playing the paranoid Fuhrer coming unglued. "Downfall" was heightened by its concentrated time and space. "Baader-Meinhof" is historically accurate to a fault: too many names, dates and events over too much historical time (and reel time -- 149 minutes). It regains its focus toward the end, after the gang's original members are rounded up, jailed, put on trial and go on a hunger strike. But it would have benefited by zeroing in on fewer characters from the start. Otherwise, only Germans who lived through the period can fully grasp the details. Many such Germans were RAF sympathizers, transfixed by them, their agenda, and by the circus trials that resulted -- until the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, Germany's rough equivalent of America's 9-11. If there's a moral or a parallel today, it's that we're still faced with similar dilemmas that inspired the uptick in terrorism then: Palestinian statelessness, dubious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, financial crises and a growing divide between rich and poor caused by unfettered rogue capitalism. Why today's youth doth protest too little? Perhaps because the RAF experience taught them it's better to be docile and look out for No. 1 if you want security. There was worldwide disillusionment with the counterproductive evil of terrorism. The Baader-Meinhof group resembled the American Weathermen but were longer-lived and much more destructive in their belief that random acts of violence could bring down an oppressive government. They aimed to create a more human society by inhuman means. Edel's film is a compelling chronicle of how they lost not only the battle and the war but their own humanity in the process. -- Post-Gazette film critic emeritus Barry Paris can be reached at [email protected]. . -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
