Downfall’s producer-screenwriter Bernd Eichinger and Last Exit to Brooklyn director Uli Edel are accustomed to controversy. Nothing, however, might have adequately prepared them for the storm surrounding The Baader Meinhof Complex when it was released in Germany earlier this year.
While most critics think the film is the most exciting thing to hit German screens since the New Cinema brats were still sneering at their war generation elders, others feel that Complex’s depiction of the Baader Meinhof Gang and their campaign of terror in 1970s Germany congeals into an entirely distasteful action movie.
Certainly the film, which features a blitzkreig of turbulent historical details from Vietnam, Bolivia, Prague, Paris and the Middle East, contextualises the extreme actions of the ultra-left-wing guerillas. Context, however, is not quite the same thing as justification or sympathy.
If anything, this startling, fascinating and technically flawless account of the gang’s campaign does not romanticise its revolutionaries enough. Even when we’re in the company of criminal-turned-ideologue Andreas Baader, his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin and the radical journalist Ulrike Meinhof, we never seem to engage with them as people.
This lack of empathy makes their increasingly destructive futile acts seem little more than that. Long before their infamous last stand at the 1977 Mogadishu hijack, we, the audience, have leapfrogged ahead in the disillusionment stakes.
The extensive 150 minute running time doesn’t help, though it does lend an air of authority.