The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

The Baader Meinhof Complex arrives with the grim self-assurance of a film that has done its homework and wishes you to know it. Uli Edel's retelling of the Red Army Faction's first decade moves with the momentum of a bank robbery, and it seldom pauses to explain itself. This is, in most respects, a virtue. The film shows instead of sermonizing, and its refusal to lecture the audience about the moral status of its protagonists is the source of whatever unease it generates. We are left to sort the killers from the martyrs on our own, which is a rarer gift in contemporary cinema than it ought to be.

The political texture is thick and unmistakable. Bombs detonate outside American military installations. Industrialists are shot in their cars. The rhetoric of imperialism and capital runs through the dialogue like a current, and the film does not flinch from the revolutionary vocabulary its subjects spoke. That the camera declines to endorse the violence is a matter of framing, not of softening. The women in the group, Meinhof, Ensslin, Proll, Mohnhaupt, hold command positions and pull triggers alongside the men, a fact drawn from the historical record and presented without commentary. The cast is uniformly white, which is what the actual West German underground looked like, and the Palestinian training camps appear as plot mechanics, not as a lesson.

Where the film draws fire is accuracy. The family of Jurgen Ponto objected to the staging of his murder, and the widow returned her Federal Cross of Merit in protest. Such disputes are the price of dramatizing recent history. The result is a propulsive, chilly thriller that trusts its audience to keep up, and mostly earns that trust.