The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Germany's entry to this years foreign film Oscar race is the ambitious retelling of the early years of the West German terrorist group the Red Army Faction. The RAF were responsible for at least 34 deaths and many more injuries during its existence, many of those coming in the group's early years as depicted in Uli Edel's film.

Screenwriting 101 will tell you to define your main character and to define his or her need - the desire of the character will drive the story forward. Think of the classic screenplays and you'll be able to work out quite easily who the protagonist is and what they want. Clarice Starling needs to find the senator's daughter, TE Lawrence wants to help the Arabs lead a revolt against the Ottoman empire, Rocky wants to be a heavyweight champion, LB Jeffries wants to discover whether a murder has been committed across the courtyard. Well for the life of me I couldn't work out either either who the main character in this was in the Baader-Meinhof Complex, nor what he, she or anyone in the film wanted.

Ostensibly the RAF want to establish themselves amongst the plethora of revolutionary and radical groups. They want themselves to be heard, for people to take notice, for American to pull out of Vietnam. The pledge to prevent what they see as the rise of fascism once again, to fight West Germany's capitalist establishment and to "annihilate, to destroy, to smash the system of imperialist domination, on the political, economic, and military planes." But what on earth motivates such a group to commit heinous acts? Vandalism, theft and murder are all within what the groups sees as acceptable acts, but the viewer never gets a sense of how they came to this conclusion. Perhaps there isn't an easy answer to this question, and perhaps it is not in the remit of a screenplay to explore such motivations, but after 2 hours 45 minutes you do feel shortchanged when such an unfocused, overloaded film leaves you knowing nothing more about the RAF than you did when you went in.

There are saving graces. The Baader-Meinhof gang, as they were known initially, come across as a rather morally bankrupt bunch of hypocritical, senseless extremists and not the courageous, activists that I feared they would. This is after all a gang of indiscriminate murdering, vandalising thugs, and not some misunderstood intelligent politically savvy left wing crowd. Hard to believe reports that a high percentage of Germany's youth sympathised with the gang, but apparently it is so. Fortunately Edel resists any temptation to glamorise the gang but despite this, there is still some concern that any film focusing on the now disbanded organisation would give them some unnecessary coverage and only serve to upset the many victims of the RAFs attacks. This controversy upon its release in its homeland did little to help ignite it at the box office, as might have been expected and in fact it flopped quite badly - a severe blow to Uli Edel and his team who reputedly made the most expensive German film in history. It seems likely then that it may also be the German film industry's most expensive bomb.

Why then has it been entered in the Oscar race by a country who must surely have had others films to choose from? Perhaps this may play better overseas where the controversy very clearly doesn't exist. Few people will be at all familiar with the RAF and fewer still with the key individuals within the organisation that are portrayed here. The film has technical merit, screenplay aside. Edel is more than competent with his direction, the acting is impressive and the production values are strong.

Yet if you, like me, find you learn nothing from a film that has sacrificed plot and narrative for character study you have to chalk this one up as a pretty sizable failure since those characters reveal very little about themselves in the entire duration. A very noble failure no doubt, and one that has some very large plus points, but a failure nonetheless.

C