OVP: The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

Film: The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)
Stars: Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck, Johanna Wokalek, Nadja Uhl, Bruno Ganz
Director: Uli Edel
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Germany)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

The movies are occasionally a great history lesson.  You go into the film not knowing much about, or perhaps anything about, a particular aspect of history and you leave it not only feeling informed, but also eager to see what else the internet has in-store in regard to a particular chapter in history.  This is what I thought when I saw The Baader Meinhof Complex, a 2008-German film that starts off seemingly in the same direction as the classic Z (the quintessential foreign-language thriller), but ends up with a sharper look at how movements can be deceiving and how cults can be confusing.  It's a fascinating look at the way the public opinion can be swayed.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about a group of protesters that eventually formed the Red Army Faction in 1960's/1970's began and slowly fell apart as they gained notoriety.  The film follows a left-wing journalist named Ulrike Meinhof (Gedeck) as she covers a group of protesters, led principally by Andreas Baader (Bleibtreu) and his lover Gudrun (Wokalek).  Meinhof becomes enamored with the group, eventually abandoning her children in order to pursue their cause, and gives up all journalistic integrity by immersing herself, almost Patty Hearst-style, within the group.  The film follows them as they frequently break out of prison, and eventually fall into a life of violence.  Their final imprisonment, in a maximum security jail, results in them getting at each other's throats, using each other for their own political ends while the movement outside largely moves past them, eventually seizing control of a West German embassy and hijacking a plane.  The movie juxtaposes the comparatively tame movement started by Baader-Meinhof with this new movement, where they are trying to break out people they only know in legend.  The ending is a dour affair, with the imprisoned hostages, realizing that they will never escape, committing a mass suicide while outside the new RAF kills a hostage they had been holding prisoner in hopes of getting their first generation RAF forebearers released from prison.

The film's best attribute is the sleekly edited narrative.  The film's story was largely unknown to me, so my usual hangups with knowing what is going to happen in a biopic weren't there, and as a result the tension from most of the chases were really marvelous.  It was also quite exhilarating to see, particularly framed against mother-of-two Meinhof, how far down the rabbit hole the violence and fight against repressive policing and fight against the government will lead.  The best scene in the movie, bar-none, is a scene where Meinhof is secretly helping with a prison escape, using her cover as a journalist to enter the prison to interview Baader.  In the scene, multiple people die and Meinhof does have a moment as the RAF is escaping where she could stay behind-she hasn't yet been implicated and could just be an innocent journalist.  She decides to flee, and seals her own doom.

The film is also fairly obsessed with the morally grey territory of the characters.  Some critics more familiar with this period in German history have wondered if the film glamorizes the group too much-I think the opposite may be the case, if anything.  The film does one of the best jobs I have seen in a long time of trying to find the vicious cruelty of this group (they end up being a group of thugs and murderers) with their causes, particularly at the beginning when they seem to be about something more than large-scale vandalism and vendettas.

If the film has a principle flaw, it might be character development.  Even the most well-drawn people in the film (the title duo plus Gudrun) have very little told about themselves.  Only Meinhof's actions seem to be well-charted, and most of the rest of the cast becomes interchangeable, with a constant pettiness surrounding everyone that makes you wonder where the adulthood or levels of maturity are in this group-pragmatism is gone, but why?  We don't really understand some of the rasher decisions of seemingly smart people, and that makes the movie, which is really interesting, too much of a question when it hopes to also be an answer.

Those are my thoughts on this interesting German film-what about yours?  Are you familiar with this movie, or this time in German history?  If so, share in the comments.  And if not, weigh in on your favorites in the Foreign Film race of 2008!