There are moments during this mass biopic when the mood swings so far from urban terrorism that it resembles a tale of heroism featuring the French Resistance: underground heroes fighting an occupying power.
Watch film trailers now »Such is the intriguing, nebulous nature of Bernd Eichinger's script – a composite based largely on the book by Stefan Aust but also soaked in a peculiar form of worship that turns violent extremists into modern folk heroes.
Which is precisely what happened when dilettantes, intellectuals and socialist firebrands swapped theoretical self-indulgence for real action in 1970s Germany.
They saw themselves as saviours of a way of life threatened by a new fascism and determined to fight it whatever the cost.
Led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, charismatic activist and leftist sympathiser respectively, the gang of decadent middle-class radicals calling itself the Red Army Faction (RAF) launched a devastating wave of attacks on the authorities and anyone associated with the system they despised.
There were bombings, robberies, assassinations and kidnappings. It was a sustained reign of terror not seen in Germany since the days of the Nazis, and all in the name of idealism.
From the outset Eichinger and director Uli Edel tempt audiences to sympathise with the players at the heart of this murderous game. They concentrate heavily on Meinhof, a journalist and working mother, who finds herself drawn to the luminous figure of Baader, a natural leader and born urban guerrilla whose sheer magnetism draws acolytes to him.
As Baader's allure grows, so does his power. The authorities are not blind and he is arrested. Meinhof acts as a decoy in the raid to free him. When her comrades flee, she bolts too. At that moment she is one of them.
Eichinger's script is skilfully rendered, telling a convoluted story with speed and excitement. Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) and Baader's partner Gudrun Ensslin (played with haunting realism by Johanna Wokalek in the film's best performance) form the core of the piece but around them floats a superb ensemble cast that delivers what might be an overtly political treatise with thrills, spills and chills. Bruno Ganz cameos as a relentless police chief.
It has its faults. The screenplay is heavily loaded with dogma and is occasionally unbalanced because of it. The sheer weight of characters means some personalities are
only sketched, but the overwhelming sense of ferocious change never wanes.
Yet Eichinger, Edel and their cast together succeed in tracing the brief but bloody lives and times of a band of revolutionaries who retain the power to hypnotise and impress.
A companion piece to Spielberg's Munich but with a harsher and colder perspective, The Baader Meinhof Complex is an unforgettable reminder of how idealism can be corrupted. It is without doubt one of the films of the year. Unmissable.
On limited release
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