Brilliant Complex

If you, like Nettertainment, you get excited at the nexus of movies, politics, sex, violence and history, then get to a theater by next Thursday or maybe the Thursday after, before this leaves town:



It may seem sacrilegious on 9/11 to be writing about the birth of modern Western urban terrorism, but it's actually a great time to be thinking about it, especially if we're ever going to defeat it. I can't write a better review of The Baader-Meinhof Complex than Dana Stevens here in Slate, and Christopher Hitchens writes authoritatively about the era in praising the movie:

Researching this in the late 1970s in Germany, I became convinced that the Baader Meinhof phenomenon actually was a form of psychosis. One of the main recruiting grounds for the gang was an institution at the University of Heidelberg called the Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv, or Socialist Patients Collective, an outfit that sought to persuade the pitifully insane that they needed no treatment save social revolution...

The Baader Meinhof Complex, like the excellent book by Stefan Aust on which it is based, is highly acute in its portrayal of the way in which mania feeds upon itself and becomes hysterical. More arrests mean that more hostages must be taken, often in concert with international hijackers, so that ever more exorbitant “demands” can be made. This requires money, which in turn demands more robbery and extortion. If there are doubts or disagreements within the organization, these can always be attributed to betrayal or cowardice, resulting in mini-purges and micro-lynchings within the gang itself.

All performed by brilliant and magnetic German actors, most notably Martina Gedick (The Lives of Others) as the leftwing bourgeous journalist and mother who interviews the gang before joining and writing their propaganda; Moritz Bleibtreu (Run Lola Run) as the juvenile delinquent turned notorious terrorist gang leader, Andreas Baader; and the amazing Johanna Wokalek as Gudrun Ensslin, the real co-leader and sexual mate of Baader, extreme and smart, the core ideologist, who along with Baader seems to be using Meinhof more than anything else.

The movie is extremely accurate to the events as well as the look and feel of the times (some scenes shot in the same places), and comes from a book of the same name written by Stefen Aust, who was a journalist colleague of Meinhof's from before she joined up. He advised on the picture, which was written and produced by Bernard Ettinger (Downfall) and directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn). It's the most expensive movie ever made in Germany, covering ten years (1967-1977) in two and a half hours, and once it gets rolling (after the forebodingly paradisaical opening with Meinhof's family in a nudist resort), it's like a gangster movie on 1970's speed, covering a staggering train ride of events, sharply shot, with a forgotten late '60's to late 70's style that takes you back, one of those time machine movies where you actually think you're there.

Definitely for fans of The Wire, looks like repeat viewing will be in order. The "Complex" of the title refers to a number of things including the name confustion -- the press called it the Baader-Meinhof Gang but they called themselves the Red Army Faction (and Baader paid a designer to create their militant logo). The movie is also complex in not overtly judging the characters, rather letting the totality of the presentation, even to the last shot before it bang-cuts to the director's name, and your own conscience be your guide to how desperate they are, how bloodthirsty, even if the injustices they claim to be responding to need addressing. It's the mental complex Hitchens refers to.

The movie made me run to Wikipedia and other sources. People don't know or don't remember how scary the world was back then, with the Vietnam War, the first ever to be televised, such a neverending grievance that it seemed to infect every level and institution in American society. It became a prime rallying flag for unrest in Europe as well, where revolutionary Communist ideology (especially Mao) existed in the open, college youth and beyond, and at the fringe activism morphed into passionate and deadly "action", an idea that spread around the world through cells like this one and training camps run by the PLO. Strange bedfellows, like bands collaborating for an album or tour, or just supplying weaponry.

What's so fascinating is that this group of middle class intellectuals convinced themselves that blowing up buildings, kidnapping and killing would somehow spark a spontaneous or coalescing revolution, assumedly with them in charge, that they taught themselves how to do all this, and that they spawned generations who carried on under their banner, to the point where they don't even know the one trying to break them out of jail.

There's echoes of Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise (with Johanna Wokalek as the Anne Wiazemsky?) but of the two Godard-influenced pictures I saw this week...this was the keeper.