Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)
The Baader Meinhof Complex is a very sobering film about a very sobering subject. One can't help but admire the courage, the audacity — the nerve! — of a small group such as the Red Army Faction, the RAF, also known as the Baader Meinhof Complex. The Red Army Faction, the group's preferred name, was a left-wing protest group which evolved into one of the most violent and feared groups in Europe, and especially in Germany, their founding place and home base. "The Baader Meinhof Gang" was a media tag hung on the group in reference to its leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.
Whoever chose the opening and closing credits music deserves an Oscar simply for that. If you understand anything at all about Baader and Meinhof and their followers, you'll understand the music. If you don't understand before watching the film, I think you will afterward. Before the first words of the opening credits flash on the screen, the unmistakable beginning of Janis Joplin's classic begins, first the subdued beat... tsk-tsk-tsk... then the words, "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?" And the closing credits? How about Bob Dylan singing "Blowing in the Wind?" Perfect point and counterpoint. A classic opening and a closing classic, paeans to a classic-to-be film!
The film starts pleasantly enough, showing Ulrike "Ricky" Meinhof, one of the namesakes of the group and the film, relaxing on a beach on the island of Sylt on Germany's North Sea coast, a popular summer family resort. The next scene is also pleasant, a summer garden party with dancing and cocktails and food. Here's where the brave, yet tragic, story portrayed here really begins, with Ulrike Meinhof reading an open letter to Her Majesty Farah Diba, wife of the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, supported by the US and much of the Western world, and who was later overthrown during the revolution. Meinhof says in the letter, "Most Persian farmers (have) an annual income of less than 100 marks (about $25 at the time). And most Persian women lose every second child to hunger, poverty and disease. And the children who work 14 hours a day … the minister of justice had his eyes gouged out." She goes on to add a few more bons mots, but you get the point. It's a scathing letter, but it's only a precursor of what's yet to come.
Article comments
1 - Lou Novacheck
Talk about timing. One of the members of this group was just arrested yesterday in connection with one of the murders depicted in the film.