A new film about the Baader-Meinhof gang attempts to deglamorise the terrorists by showing us the plain facts, writes Alistair Harkness
BLAME it on Tom Wolfe. When he coined the phrase "radical chic" to describe a shindig that composer Leonard Bernstein was throwing for the gun-toting, Mao-influenced Black Panthers in 1970, he provided a handy catch-all phrase to mock any celebrity,
middle- or upper-class flirtation with revolutionary politics – be it a serious engagement with a cause (Jane Fonda's attempt to get to know the Vietcong) or a cynical appropriation of an image for marketing purposes (Madonna's Che Guevara/Patty Hearst-referencing cover shot for her American Life album).
Incisive as Wolfe's definition was, though, it has had troubling implications for the way Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang have been perceived. When an early 1990s trend for fashion accessories based on revolutionary symbols was dubbed "Prada Meinhof", the fashion connotations stuck, somewhat glossing over the violent activities of this dissident group. But now a new German film from the producer of Downfall is seeking to refocus our attention on the group's monstrous activities. The Baader-Meinhof Complex – Germany's official entry for next year's foreign language Oscar – is a serious attempt to show the violent rise and fall of this revolutionary group who waged an escalating and murderous war of political terrorism against the West German state in the 1970s.
There's just one snag: can a movie about young, good-looking terrorists (as they were) portrayed by two of Germany's biggest movie stars, Run Lola Run's Moritz Bleibtreu and The Lives of Others' Martina Gedeck, avoid glamorising the Baader-Meinhof gang even further?
"There have certainly been big discussions about this in Germany," confirms Bleibtreau, 37, who plays the group's co-founder and leader, Andreas Baader. "But that's something you can't avoid with cinema."
Especially when the person you're playing thinks of himself in such a light. "For him, being political was a fashion," nods Bleibtreu. "There's no proof that Baader was a political person before he went underground. He didn't write any manifestos, he didn't give great speeches, he didn't protest at university. He loved fast cars, he loved women, he loved guns, he loved good clothes, he loved entertainment, but at this time it was also hip to be political. He'd go to rallies, but usually to meet girls."
Baader's appeal, says Bleibtreu, was his ability to take action instead of sitting around endlessly pontificating about change and revolution. "He could see that no-one was doing anything, so he figured, 'OK, I'll take this forward.' That had a huge impact. He was the extreme opposite of the prevailing mood of the Left, which was still about flower-power and feminism. For some reason, people were attracted to this."
However, Martina Gedeck – who plays Ulrike Meinhof, the radical journalist whose writings helped define what the group stood for (or more accurately, what it stood against) – doesn't necessarily buy into her co-star's analysis. That might have something to do with her own childhood run-in with what would later be renamed the Red Army Faction. As the daughter of a successful businessman, she remembers once being hauled out of a class trip by police after a fake kidnap threat from the Baader-Meinhof gang resulted in a ransom demand being issued to her family.
"I was too young to be affected by it," says Gedeck, "but the idea that something like that could happen affected my parents very much." She's sceptical that radical chic was part of the appeal: "It's not glamorous; it's just not. As for the whole fashion part: that wasn't glamorous either. It was just the style of the late 1960s and 1970s. If you really look at it, it's a bit dirty. Their hair is not well done; the clothes are not well made. It's sloppy, not glamorous. The only thing about them was that they were young and pretty."
The problem, says Gedeck, is when you try to replicate this. "If you show it in a photo or a film, you might glamorise it because it's a copy and that's artificial. We tried not to do that with this film, but of course it's not possible to avoid it entirely. Film is always artificial."
The Baader-Meinhof Complex does, however, make a valiant effort to avoid any radical chic posturing. Sticking ruthlessly to the facts as presented in Stefan Aust's exhaustive history of the movement (from which book the film also takes its title), it presents its story in chronological order, avoiding psychoanalytically explaining away what they did. It's an approach that's also reflective of the more thoughtful and responsible way a number of film-makers have been attempting grapple with portrayals of this issue since the start of George Bush's global "War on Terror" – in United 93, Paul Greengrass stripped away artificiality in his depiction of the 11 September 2001 hijackers, refusing to load the dice with villainous music or evil speeches. And in Hunger, director Steve McQueen avoids giving credence to the cause of IRA man Bobby Sands, while recreating his bid to attain political status via a hunger strike in Northern Ireland's Maze prison in 1981. Needless to say, things haven't always been this way. Prior to 11 September 2001, Hollywood had a particularly disastrous track record whenever it tried to grapple with terrorism on screen. In 1987's A Prayer for the Dying, Mickey Rourke, then one of the biggest stars in the world, began his spectacular fall from grace by playing an IRA bomber with a heart who decides to renounce his sins after accidentally blowing up a bus full of children. Almost as bad was The Devil's Own (1997), which tried to make us care about an IRA murderer intent on procuring arms from America by casting Brad Pitt.
And it's not just mainstream Hollywood fare that has trouble portraying terrorists. Bandit Queen (1994), Shekhar Kapur's harrowing film about Indian freedom fighter/terrorist Phoolan Devi, was denounced by Devi herself as rampant myth-making. The formative years of radical chic poster boy Che Guevara, meanwhile, were explored in The Motorcycle Diaries, the timeline of which meant director Walter Salles didn't have to grapple with the thorny issue of Che's status as an icon of guerrilla warfare, a killer and a supporter of totalitarianism.
Given this, it will be fascinating to see how Steven Soderbergh's forthcoming two-part biopic, Che, will portray him. Advance word suggests the film, doesn't shy away from Che's tyrannical impulses or his contradictions. This might force the vast numbers of students with the Alberto Korda portrait of the beret-wearing revolutionary on their wall to think about what that photo represents.
Che was one of the influences on the Baader-Meinhof gang, whose conception of themselves as "urban guerrillas" was drawn directly from Che's notion of peasant revolutionaries. "It was Che Guevara, it was Mao, it was all these people," says Gedeck of the group's influences. "They were the post-Nazi generation and they had their own idols and they took what they wanted from them. But like them, in devoting their life to an idea and following it, they lost their own human instincts and thought they had to confront violence with violence to overthrow it." There's nothing chic or radical about that.
• The Baader-Meinhof Complex will be in cinemas nationwide from next Friday.
