The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time when revolution was in the pot-filled air of Europe and America. Stories of underground cells of young revolutionaries waging war against the “fascist” state dominated the headlines of the day, and the hearts of many on the left. Americans were gripped by the story of Patty Hearst and her induction into the Symbionese Liberation Army; the Italians had the blood-chilling tales of the Red Brigades; and the Germans the rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof group.

The relevance of their story to our own times may seem obvious, for we too live in the shadow of terrorism. But you quickly realise that the Baader bunch had little in common with the suicide bombers of today. As the film shows, their targets — at least in the beginning — were department stores and banks, not people. When they finally committed suicide, they took nobody with them.

There are no lessons to be learnt from this film, nor do we get any great insight into the mindset of the terrorist. Directed by Uli Edel (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and written by Bernd Eichinger (Downfall), this is a well-researched and energetic history lesson that tells the fascinating and moving story of how a respected left-wing journalist such as Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) winds up joining two terrorists — Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and her boyfriend Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu) — and forms the Red Army Faction to fight the German state. It’s an unlikely combination: imagine The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee joining Al-Qaeda. Through the bombing and robbing of banks, the group become famous and a formidable threat. Once in prison, they soon fall out with each other.

The film has provoked plenty of controversy in Germany. Some have claimed it promotes “terrorist chic” and gives the group a glamour they don’t deserve. But isn’t everyone being a little po-faced about this?

Movies always glamorise bad people who happen to be good- looking. And there’s no doubt that if the handsome Andreas Baader had looked like Arafat and the sexy Ensslin didn’t resemble a gun-toting Anita Pallenberg, they wouldn’t have captured the imaginations of young Germans and been the subject of a film.

I mean, it’s certainly not their revolutionary politics that is so intriguing. Baader never seems to have a thought in his head; revolution was just an opportunity for him to break rules and tear apart taboos. In one scene we see him joyriding a car and shooting his gun at highway signs, like some drunken teenager.

Then again, he, like so many others, was captivated by the anti-authority and liberationist ethos of the 1960s counterculture. The film, though, shies away from suggesting that the removal of taboos and bourgeois restraints might have helped create a mindset that made violence more acceptable. Anyway, Andreas and Gudrun are shown as spoilt brats who are unable to submit to revolutionary discipline. This takes on a wonderfully comic turn when the Red Army Faction turn up in a revolutionary training camp in Jordan, and their nude sunbathing and “liberated” ways anger the Arab hosts.

At times the film plays like a farce, but Edel says the story of the Baader-Meinhof group “was the greatest tragedy in post-war Germany”, and I suspect he doesn’t just mean the numerous innocent people the Red Army Faction killed, but the group itself.

It’s only a tragedy, and not a farce, however, if you accept the early premise of the film that here were a group of young idealists who took up arms against the repressive and violent German state. (The film begins with the police brutally beating up a group of students demonstrating against the Shah of Iran.) In fighting for humanity, they lost their own humanity — or so we are led to believe.

Yet as the film develops we see that they were fighting the ghost of the old German fascism and not a new form. What we actually see is just how, on the whole, incredibly liberal and tolerant the German state was back then. The one sympathetic character in the whole film is the police chief, Horst Herold (Bruno Ganz), whose job it is to catch them, but who still bends over backwards to try to understand their motivation.

Unfortunately, the film tries to cover too much ground — a full 10 years — and it starts to sag in the final quarter. We are given a thorough account of the group’s history, but what’s missing is the role of human psychology. We never really get inside their heads. Was it a sense of moral duty or the absence of morality that led them to take up arms? The film gives us the complexity of a terrorist cell and how it operates, but the Baader-Meinhof complex itself remains a mystery.

18, 150 mins

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