In a sentenceTen years of West German terror at the speed of a getaway, with time for the sunglasses but not the ideas
West Germany, 1967. Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a columnist with two small daughters and a marriage going sour, watches police beat demonstrators outside a reception for the Shah of Iran in West Berlin, and a student is shot dead. Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) and Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) set fire to a Frankfurt department store and are tried for it, defended by the lawyer Horst Mahler (Simon Licht). Meinhof writes in their support, then meets them, and finds she admires them more than she admires herself. In 1970 she agrees to help Baader walk out of a supervised visit to a library. When the plan goes wrong she goes out of the window with the rest of them, and a journalist becomes a fugitive. Bruno Ganz plays Horst Herold, the policeman who sets out to understand them.
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Uli Edel’s account of the Red Army Faction is cast to the hilt and reconstructed down to the ashtrays, and it never once slows down. Thrilling for an hour, exhausting after that, and the ideas get lost under the gunfire.
Uli Edel and the producer Bernd Eichinger have taken Stefan Aust’s book on the Red Army Faction and tried to put the whole of it on screen: ten years, three generations of the group, the bombings, the arrests, the prison, the trial. It runs 149 minutes and there is not a slow one in it. That is the film’s chief quality and its chief fault. It is superbly acted and it never gives anyone, on screen or on the sofa, time to think.
The first hour is the strong part. Rainer Klausmann puts his camera inside the crowd at the 1967 demonstration against the Shah, so that when the police wade in with batons we see it at shoulder height, between heads, and cannot tell which way to run. We were properly frightened, and we knew how the scene ended. It is the one sequence in which the film shows us, rather than tells us, why these particular young people decided the state was the enemy. Bernd Lepel’s late-sixties Germany is brown and orange and full of ashtrays, and the newspaper office, the Frankfurt flats and the Berlin streets are built with the sort of care that makes you forget they were built.
Then there is the cast. Martina Gedeck plays Meinhof as a woman who talks herself into things, a writer more at home describing the barricade than standing on it, and the film’s best scenes are the ones in which she watches Baader and Ensslin and wishes she were braver. Moritz Bleibtreu’s Baader is a loudmouth in sunglasses who likes fast cars more than Marx and never pretends otherwise; Bleibtreu makes him funny, vain and restless, and lets us see how little is underneath. Johanna Wokalek is the quiet, frightening one. Her Ensslin leaves her baby and does not look back, and Wokalek plays the certainty without a flicker. Birgit Missal dresses them beautifully, leather and short skirts and fur collars, and the film knows exactly how good they look. That is an honest observation about why people followed them, and it is also a problem the film never quite faces.
Bruno Ganz, as Horst Herold, is the film’s adult. He sits in offices with Heino Ferch as his assistant and says, calmly, that you cannot beat these people without understanding what made them, and Ganz delivers it as plain sense rather than a sermon. His scenes are short and few. We wanted more of him, because he is the only character asking the question the film was presumably made to answer.
The second half is where it goes wrong. Alexander Berner cuts the years of bombings and arrests as a run of short scenes with dates stamped on them, and somewhere after the ninety-minute mark we realised we had lost track of who the new faces were. Nadja Uhl’s Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Daniel Lommatzsch’s Christian Klar arrive as the second generation and the film has no time to tell us anything about them except that they shoot people. By the end we were tired and, more worryingly, a little numb, and the film seemed to take the numbness as a response.
The script by Eichinger and Edel is scrupulous about what happened and nearly silent about why. The group’s politics come out as slogans shouted across tables, which may well be accurate, but a film can choose to stop and listen and this one keeps driving. The East, the Wall a few streets away and what was being done on the other side of it, barely comes up. Some critics think the film glamorises its subjects. We do not: it shows them as attractive and then shows them as brutal and deluded. What it does not do is choose a place to stand and look at either.
Worth an evening for the cast and the first hour, and for anyone who knows the history and wants to see it staged with this much conviction. If you do not know it, keep a pencil handy, because the film will not stop to tell you who anyone is. It carries an 18 certificate and earns every minute of it.
Most critics find the film absorbing as history. The praise clusters on the cast: Martina Gedeck’s finely graded Ulrike Meinhof is singled out repeatedly, Johanna Wokalek’s Gudrun Ensslin and Moritz Bleibtreu’s narcissistic, self-deluding Baader almost as often. Several reviews also credit the editing and cinematography with conveying the fear and upheaval of the period, and the better-disposed critics admire the film’s refusal to hand down easy judgements on the RAF.
The reservations cluster on crowding and politics. Even admirers concede the story is overstuffed, with key transformations left unexplained; the harsher reviews call it incoherent, half-told or simply dull, the gunfire leaving no room to think. The New Yorker faults the narrowness of its perspective and the absence of the Cold War context, while the Evening Standard warns it edges towards glamorising terrorism. The spread is wide, from warm to dismissive, and the dissent comes largely from the American press on the film’s later release.
Jones finds the story absorbingly told and the film gripping. He particularly praises its portrayal of the volatile Andreas Baader and disillusioned Ulrike Meinhof.
Read the full review →Newman calls it fascinating history and a very good, demanding film, though its lack of easy answers may frustrate some viewers. He praises Martina Gedeck’s performance and the film’s vivid cast, while noting its commitment to historical complexity over comforting explanations.
Read the full review →French finds the film a powerful, clear-eyed account of the RAF and the forces surrounding its rise. He praises its factual exposition and refusal to make easy judgments.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film a compelling, relevant character study, though some key character transformations remain unexplained. She praises its focused portrayal of the women and the editing and cinematography that convey the period’s fear and upheaval.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film relevant, thought-provoking and highly watchable, while noting that it approaches the edge of glamorising terrorism. They particularly praise Martina Gedeck’s finely graded performance as Ulrike Meinhof.
Read the full review →The critic finds the film politically muddled and ultimately disinteresting. He praises Edel’s ability to make the action sequences tense, despite the weak emotional stakes.
Read the full review →
Carlos · not on Fi1m yetAssayas gives the same era’s other celebrity terrorist five hours and far more thought.
Marianne and Juliane · not on Fi1m yetVon Trotta’s film about the Ensslin sisters does with two women what this does with twenty.
Good Morning, Night · not on Fi1m yetBellocchio locks the Moro kidnapping in one flat and finds the politics in the silences.
The Battle of AlgiersStill the film every account of urban insurgency is measured against, and still winning.
United Red Army · not on Fi1m yetWakamatsu’s account of Japan’s equivalent group is slower, colder and far more frightening.
