The Baader Meinhof Complex in the UK.

"With its initial emphasis on fast cars and faster women, political rhetoric and posing, it's perhaps not surprising that The Baader Meinhof Complex, directed by Uli Edel and written and produced by Bernd Eichinger (Downfall), has been accused of glamorising terrorism," writes Wendy Ide in the London Times. "But this is not the case. Eichinger's screenplay scratches under the surface of the key players in the Red Army Faction (RAF) - Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) - and finds unexpectedly little."

It's "a sprawling, episodic and interminable 70s period drama, ploddingly comparable to Steven Spielberg's Munich," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "All the cliches and hairstyles are present and correct.... There are hairy guys and hippy-chicks in astrakhan coats, and what with the homemade explosives, the free love and the chants of Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, it looks like Dr Alex Comfort's The Joy of Terrorism."

Updated through 11/19.

"I'm not sure what questions the makers of The Baader Meinhof Complex were addressing, but these might have been among them," suggests the Independent's Anthony Quinn:

[H]ow far was Germany's recent Nazi past to blame for the rise of the Red Army Faction? How did a small group of radical left-wing students of the 1960s turn into one of the most feared terrorist units of the 1970s? What was the nature of the disputes that eventually split apart the RAF, and what resonance does their legacy have today? Any one of these questions might have been a useful co-ordinate by which to plot a narrative, and it is perfectly likely that in the course of writing the screenplay Bernd Eichinger (who wrote and produced the great Downfall) considered all of them.

But it turns out he hasn't answered any of them.

"The questions [the RAF] asked of German society, the violent tactics they employed, and the sheer length of their campaign (only in 1998 did they formally dissolve) have fascinated many artists, from painter Gerhard Richter and avant-noise band Atari Teenage Riot, to filmmakers such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz who, with eight other directors, made the probing omnibus feature Germany in Autumn (1978)," writes Sukhdev Sandhu. "What's distinctive about Edel and Eichinger's treatment of the subject is its tone. It edits and packages the Red Army Fraktion (RAF) for a post-Run Lola Run or The Counterfeiters German generation that it assumes will not relate to historical violence in the sober, anguished fashion that characterised earlier treatments."

Also in the Telegraph, Sheila Johnston talks with Stefan Aust, the former Spiegel who wrote (and recently updated) the book the film is based on (Aust is also, with Eichinger, a co-screenwriter), and with Andres Veiel, who made the documentary Black Box BRD in 2001: "The two films are polar opposites, too. Black Box BRD is a contemplative, in-depth portrait of two individuals; The Baader-Meinhof Complex is, in Eichinger's words, 'a tough, fast-moving, urgent, breathless piece of movie-making. We didn't want to go into psychoanalysis.'"

"The challenge for Edel is how to render this story of idealism curdling into carnage without making it a Hammer of the Gods-style account of the wildest rock band ever to wield Kalashnikovs instead of Rickenbackers," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "It's one he doesn't overcome. Until now, he has been the go-to guy for sane studies of traumatic experiences (Christiane F., Last Exit to Brooklyn). The problem with The Baader Meinhof Complex is not just that every shoot-out or bank heist is brilliantly choreographed, but that the accompanying material does nothing to complicate or question the thrill we derive from those sequences."

"At two and a half hours, it's a risky, if laudable, strategy to outline a decade-long chronicle of events - arson attacks, bank raids, assassinations and kidnappings - without adopting, or privileging, a fully developed character with whom the audience can relate to or identify," writes Wally Hammond in Time Out. "As an action-packed pageant of events it is excitingly demonstrative and provocative, but as human drama it proves a mite too enigmatic and unyielding."

"Does [the film] glamorise terrorism?" asks Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "I think not, though it skates fairly near the edge at times. What it certainly does is remind us that understandable causes are sometimes driven into impotence and thus pushed towards an escalating violence that those who espouse them never imagined. That's why this impressively mounted and thoroughly researched film is so watchable, whatever one's views about its fanatical participants."

In September, Mark Olsen moderated a Q&A with executive producer Martin Moszkowicz and filed a brief report for the Los Angeles Times.

And as Cineuropa notes, this is Germany's entry in the Oscar race.

Updates, 11/15: "The 1962 'Oberhausen Manifesto' which launched the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders, didn't sound all that dissimilar to the mission statements of the Red Army Faction," notes Philip Oltermann in a fine overview of the culture at the time: "the filmmakers called for a critical engagement with Germany's National Socialist past and its ongoing social ills, favoured realism over escapism and championed the direct action of the auteur over the laboured democratic process of the studio system. The title of the press conference at which the manifesto was launched had iconoclastic swagger: 'Daddy's cinema is dead.' Yet the idea that all German filmmakers of the 1970s were somehow 'pro-terror' is a myth. If anything, the opposite is the case."

Also in the Guardian: The RAF were "the world's first celebrity terrorists," blogs Kirk Leech. "They may have become the embodiment of radical chic, but they were no threat to the German state or anything to romance. One of the truths that the film reveals is that outside of their proclivity for guns and bombs, the group shared many of the prejudices of mainstream left-liberal opinion, then and now."

Update, 11/18: The Observer's Philip French: "The careers of Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof inspired one of the finest German pictures of the post-war years, Margarethe von Trotta's The German Sisters (1981), about the lives of the daughters of a stern Protestant minister from the 1950s to the late 1970s.... Anyone seeing The Baader Meinhof Complex should look out for von Trotta's subtle film, but they'll find it a very different experience." As for Baader, "What makes this such a powerful movie is the factual nature of the exposition and the refusal to make easy judgment."

Updates, 11/17: "It's terror porn, good terror porn and, of course, just what we want," writes David Cox in the Guardian. "Should we feel anxious that our appetite is somehow abnormal, we're assured that, at the time, one in four young Germans openly expressed their support for the Baader-Meinhof gang."

"This is overwhelmingly the story of the Red Army Faction as rock stars, and in that it is a film that would have far more appeal to halfwitted sub-Jim Morrison cocksman Andreas Baader than it can speak about the Shakespearian tragedy of Ulrike Meinhof, intellectual and mother turned deluded, if utterly eloquent bomber," writes Owen Hatherley:

It also marks another incredibly technically accomplished and politically and morally all-over-the-place triumph for the new New German Cinema, after Hitler worrying about having to poison his dog (Downfall), bet-hedging Ostalgie (Good Bye Lenin! - and I was successfully emotionally manipulated by that one, I can tell you) an insufferable but beautifully shot tale of intellectuals saving the world from totalitarianism (The Lives of Others), and more sexy middle class revolutionaries, this time contemporary and non-violent (The Edukators). All are fascinating for being popular, populist non-Hollywood films that nonetheless are rampant with Hollywood tropes, from sentimentality to many, many big explosions. It's an odd phenomenon, which can't quite be dismissed or hailed as yet.

Update, 11/19: Online listening tip. Ambrose Heron talks with Eichinger.

Posted by dwhudson at November 14, 2008 2:09 AM