The Baader Meinhof Complex

[pro-bassoonist]

UK official site:
http://www.thebaadermeinhofcomplex.com/

Set to be released in the U.S. on March 30th. Courtesy of MPI. Nominated for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year (2009).

Film4:

Docudrama from the director of Last Exit To Brooklyn focusing on extreme-left 1970s German terrorists the Red Army Faction aka The Baader-Meinhof.

Pre-9/11 and the 'war on terror', you'd be forgiven for assuming that international terrorism was some kind of super-outré lifestyle choice, with its own clothing line, cool accessories and an endless supply of kidnap victims on tap. The only drawbacks: being banged up for a couple of decades or, at the very worst, being individually picked off by special forces (although if you were a male terrorist you had even more of a fighting chance, as everyone knew they always shot the women first).

At least, that's the impression you might take away from The Baader Meinhof Complex, during an exchange between a pair of sexy, second generation RAF (Red Army Faction) recruits and a Middle Eastern fixer. "We can invade the US Embassy in Kuwait - or there's the possibility we can hijack a Lufthansa plane," their agent casually suggests, as if he were a maître d' presenting two different restaurant menus to a couple of lovebirds on a dinner date. (In the event, the RAF picks the plane platter with hostages to go.)

So although it would be nuts (given how the central characters wind up) to accuse The Baader Meinhof Complex of glamourising terrorism or playing fast and loose with the facts, the film could certainly be mistaken for trading in radical chic, dealing as it does with a young, hip, disproportionately middle-class organisation, much given to Bonnie And Clyde-style posturing and gunplay.

The filmmakers can also hardly be blamed for the fact that quite a few of Germany's most wanted were ridiculously good looking in real life, and they've cast accordingly. If Germany's film directors were in thrall to US counterculture during the 1970s, so too were its activists - headline stars of their own imagined movies. That young terrorist strutting down the quaking aisles of the Lufthansa jet in 1977 is modelling a very iconic Che t-shirt. While Andreas Baader, co-founder of the RAF, was no stranger to make-up, false eyelashes and tight trousers without underwear, the better to show off that 'arsch'.

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