FROM MTV.COM: "The Baader Meinhof Complex" is a smart and explosively powerful movie about a German student terrorist gang of the 1970s, and the wave of arson, robbery, kidnappings and murder with which they shook their country's government — in the process triggering exactly the sort of right-wing repression against which they claimed to be crusading. The picture was a deserving Oscar nominee earlier this year for Best Foreign Language Film, and in its weaving-together of the intricacies of social ferment and the bullet-riddled reality of what the gang wrought, it's a fascinating achievement.
The Baader Meinhof Group, as the gang was called in the press (they styled themselves the Red Army Faction, or RAF), was actually led by Gudren Ensslin (played here by Johanna Wokalek), a blonde parson's daughter turned steely-willed Marxist revolutionary, along with her highly charismatic boyfriend, Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), a petty thief and intellectual primitive with a taste for fast cars (usually stolen) and guns, and a grand vision of himself as a Brandoesque action-movie hero. Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck, of the Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others") was popularly portrayed as the group's other leader, but was essentially a subsidiary propaganda minister — a famous left-wing journalist who found herself drawn into the group's violent orbit after being confronted with the hypocrisy of her revolutionary rhetoric in print when measured against her failure to join in armed action herself.
Continue reading 'The Baader Meinhof Complex': Student Unrest, By Kurt Loder
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