If the day comes when I’m not turned on by a woman in combat boots, waving a gun around and babbling about workers' rights, I'll know that something very core to my being has died. There is a long list of great movies with hot guerilla Marxist babes and those who wish to draw water from this particular pool will find themselves duly quaffed with The Baader-Meinhof Complex. They’ll also find themselves watching a good (but not great) movie along the way.
It is the late 1960s and it ain’t just America that is rife with dirty, stinking hippies. They have them in Germany, too – as if those guys didn’t stink enough. We meet leftist journalist Ulrike Meinhof, lookin’ like a Teutonic Christiane Amanpour, as she gets more and more radicalized by the delivering-of-head-beatings-by-cops-to-protestors that was all the rage back then. She meets up with the smokin’ hot Gudrun Esslin, who looks like she shops at Der Urban Outfitter when not attending lectures about disrupting the fascist state. Together with Esslin’s boyfriend, the crazy-eyed Andreas Baader, they form a troika of bank-robbing, civilian-killing, collateral damage-making bandits whose expanding “Red Army Faction” wipes the floor of any all-talk, no-action American domestic terrorist group like the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army. Never let it be said that when the Germans put their mind to something they don’t follow through.
What is fascinating about all of these groups is that the seed of their discontent is, in many ways, justified. American kids may've been protesting for free speech, free love and free dope, but German kids were rebelling against their parents many of whom were, let's face it, compliant with Nazism. The group's idealism quickly decays into thuggery, though, and the body count grows until we, the audience, are finally forced to break with our characters and change from cheerleading to condemnation.
This trick, best pulled off recently by the film Monster, is a difficult one and, alas, I don’t think The Baader-Meinhof Complex has the chops to do it. I have a personal interest in this subject matter, however, so I inserted my own context for some of the scenes. If you are coming to this fresh, you may find yourself a tad lost. I also found it difficult to truly get inside the characters’ heads, something pretty key when dealing with anti-heroes. The film does excel, however, in its sweeping scope, criminal detail and procedural scenes.
Bruno Ganz (star of every German movie ever) has a nice turn as the government big tasked with foiling the faction. The final section of the movie veers in a very unexpected direction. After broad sequences of action, scheming and hot girls in slick clothes, we share a lengthy amount of screentime on trials and imprisonment. At first blush, it seems anti-climactic, but upon reflection, this is the best part of the movie. This is when The Baader-Meinhof Complex stops being about hip commie spectacle and focuses on the (incredibly screwed up) characters.
On this particular niche’s shelf, The Baader-Meinhof Complex doesn’t have the sting of Paul Schrader’s Patty Hearst, Bruno Baretta’s Four Days in September or Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, but certainly is a worthy addition to the collection.
Vitals:
Release Date: August 21, 2009 (New York), August 28, 2009 (Additional Cities)
Studio: Vitagraph Films
Director: Uli Edel
Cast: Martina Gedek, Moritz Bleibtreu, Johanna Wokalek, Bruno Ganz
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: R
