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Movie Review - "The Baader Meinhof Complex"


Movie opens with an innocuous nude beach scene with Meinhof and her family spending the day out. Meinhof, a lady of great temper is shown to exhibit kind heartedness in the opening scene followed by stately appeal of revolution in the party conducted in her backyard. Brief interludes of students staging a protest and the police lining up before them; it is still innocuous at this point in time. Meinhof is shy, but as she reads through to the passage where the reference to fooling German pride is extolled, she is flushed red in her face, the interludes gradually turn violent. In fact, before you realise, the protest, which was only a gathering with placards turns into a pandemonium with the police beating up the innocent and the ladies. This scene is the evidence of what the viewer is up for. If you are not exposed to foreign language movies, you will find it very refreshing, for the movie is anything but Hollywood. Too many Hollywood action movies preserve the action for a moment to let the audience grasp it, perhaps to let them know about the investment made in the movie, how so marvellous and dramatic it is on the screen!

But this movie is no Hollywood entertainer. The frames are fluid and in flux, they shift back and forth between the crowd and police. The background score is like the overture to the operatic excellence of a movie that is before you. Camera spans across the street with the young and old running away madly, and in a flash, the police opens up water jets on to the protesters. The water jet actually pours on the camera with such ferocity that you share the apathy of the protesters.

The big hall in which Meinhof attends the revolution’s gathering is so pure and clean without any moments where a typical Hollywood movie freezes and plugs in the vicissitudes and eccentricities of heros and villans. There is no forceful emphasis at all, the movie is pure and if you have not watched other foreign language movies of this stature, you better do. Movies that come to mind are dutch made Zwartboek and Korean made ‘Good bad and weird’

Its the protests in the movie that you will sit up and straighten yourself for. its not like the streets are lit up for the Hollywood studio to shoot a protest. In this movie they are so well shot and are so canonical and real; acts of vandalism are not accentuated, they are just part of the protest. Bunch of students are toppling over a van, some are torching a medical store and some are busy voicing the protest. Even the scene where Rudi is shot thrice in the head, you would see that it could hardly have been bettered.

We are shown the complex transformation of Meinhow, the journalist who turns into a rebellion through an act of almost believable prospect. A conscientious journalist, Meinhof lets herself write long tirades on the government. The acts of rebellion lead her to imprisonment.

I must say, this is one of the most inspiring movies I have seen. Inspiring, for the movie is proof that there is choice. There is choice, as a viewer to renounce the vapid platitudes of Hollywood, for there is a whole new world of cinema waiting elsewhere.

At one point, Meinhof explodes “I could write a book on your foolishness”. But the realisation is too late.

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