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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

BD impressions: The Baader Meinhof Complex

1:31 PM / BD Impressions / 8 Comments

I knew a little about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a terrorist group which was active in Germany from the 1970s through to the late 90s, but I had no knowledge of the people behind it and never heard the name "Baader-Meinhof" until I saw the Andrzej Zulawski interview that my brother edited for the Mondo Vision DVD release of LA FEMME PUBLIQUE. Zulawski described them as "dangerously horrible", and at least on the basis of Uli Edel's film about the group, THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, I'm inclined to feel that this is an entirely accurate summary. I don't doubt that the film takes considerable liberties with the truth - what film based on real events doesn't? - but if it stands for anything, the son of one of the group's victims has praised it for showing the RAF for what it really was: a mismatched, disorganised bunch of posers and nutcases whose love of violence ultimately overshadowed any ideals they might originally have had.

What the film does extremely well, especially in the early stages, is to capture the mood which gave rise to extreme left wing groups like the RAF in the second half of the 20th century. As the American theatrical trailer (viewable here) succinctly sums it up, "The children of the Nazi generation have grown up in the ruin their parents created. They vowed fascism would never rule their country again." In his blog, Amm Sam takes exception to this description, pointing out that the trailer provides a rather warped view of these individuals (try applying a similarly romanticised description to Al'Qaeda and see how far it gets you). He's right, and in terms of the personalities of the people behind the RAF, it's disingenuous to claim that they were simply people who were trying to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the past. However, it gives the viewer something approaching an appreciation of why so many ordinary Germans, saddled with the collective guilt of the atrocities the previous generation had committed, felt compelled to side with and condone the actions of a group of indiscriminate murderers. The gang itself consists of a diverse gaggle of idealists, juvenile delinquents and plain old lovers of violence, and any claim to having a single unified goal quickly crumbles as naive idealism gives way to in-fighting, betrayal and self-preservation. (To say nothing of their unlikely alliances with other terrorist movements whose ideologies were so thoroughly removed from their own it's a wonder they didn't blow each other up.)

It may be called THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, but Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibrteu) actually doesn't make much of an impression. The strongest impact comes from the two female leads: young radical Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck). The latter, who in many ways serves as our "way in" to the gang, starts off talking about "the revolution" only in theoretical terms but ultimately finds herself wilfully participating in the gang's violent exploits. Gedeck is excellent in the role, which serves as an admirable attempt to humanise the woman without condoning her behaviour, even if the script (by THE DOWNFALL producer Bernd Eichinger) doesn't quite manage to pull off her change of heart in a meaningful way. The breakneck pace at which the film moves (it's a two and a half hour rollercoaster) means that there's little time for introspection, and in the space of a few minutes of screen time Meinhof goes from saying she could never leave her two young daughters to willingly abandoning them to a Palestinian refugee camp. Moments like these, and the seemingly endless parade of different but ultimately interchangeable faces, make you realise just what a massive undertaking the filmmakers have saddled themselves with, and it's not entirely surprising that the human story does ultimately become a little lost.

In a number of ways, I'm reminded of Martin Scorsese's GANGS OF NEW YORK. That might seem like an odd comparison, but bear with me. Like this, GANGS OF NEW YORK was extremely ambitious in its scope and scale, attempting to capture the mood of a specific place during a specific period and weaving multiple narratives about a diverse and often only distantly connected set of characters. Both films threaten at any moment to collapse under their own weight and both are, I'll be the first to admit, flawed pieces, but at the same time quite breathtaking in what they set out to achieve and just how much of that they succeed in accomplishing. THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX is a thrilling, eye-opening and at times shocking look at a group that, despite the carnage they caused in Europe in the latter half of the 20th century, has been subjected to surprisingly little attention by the film industry. Dangerously horrible indeed.

By the way, Christopher Hitchens wrote an excellent review of the film in VANITY FAIR. It's well worth reading.

Image quality: A stupendously good presentation from MPI, a label I hadn't even heard of previously (though having looked them up, it appears that they were behind the "controversial" BARAKA BD and also distribute titles for Dark Sky Films), and one that gets a hearty thumbs-up from me in pretty much every respect. Detail is superb and the compression is for the most part excellent, barring some mild to moderate artefacting that I noticed on a couple of occasions (see Example 15). Owing to the nature of the film itself, which occasionally mixes in archival footage shot on both film and video, the look is somewhat inconsistent, but this should in no way be inferred as a black mark against the BD itself. The audio mix is thunderously good too. 9.5/10

The Baader Meinhof Complex
studio: MPI; country: USA; region code: A; codec: VC-1;
file size: 38.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 36.66 Mbit/sec

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