This year has seen the appearance of ferociously exact, even minimalist films about European terrorism, in which visual artistry is placed provocatively to the fore: movies closer to installation than drama. Steve McQueen’s superlative Hunger showed the death-agony and death-ecstasy of IRA man Bobby Sands. And, on the festival circuit, Jaime Rosales’ fascinating Bullet in the Head is an almost entirely wordless movie showing the day-to-day life of an Eta cell, filmed in long-shot, as if by a police surveillance team.

Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex is very different: more conventional and ostensibly more ambitious. Based on the 1997 non-fiction bestseller by Stefan Aust, former editor of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, it is more or less the entire life-story of West Germany’s Red Army Faction from the late 1960s to the late 70s: that is, the Baader-Meinhof gang, led by firebrand Andreas Baader, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, and radical journalist-turned-revolutionary Ulrike Meinhof, played by Martina Gedeck. Taking them on is federal police chief Horst Herold, a thoughtful liberal played by Bruno Ganz, famed for his portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Downfall.

The resulting film is a sprawling, episodic and interminable 70s period drama, ploddingly comparable to Steven Spielberg’s Munich. All the cliches and hairstyles are present and correct. There are the parties, the arguments about socialism and the chaotic squats – which, confusingly, are almost indistinguishable from the relatively comfortable prison cells the terrorists are finally allowed, making it tricky to tell whether or not those concerned have been let out on bail. There are hairy guys and hippy-chicks in astrakhan coats, and what with the homemade explosives, the free love and the chants of Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, it looks like Dr Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Terrorism.

Edel re-enacts the mix of naturist-hedonism, frustration and anger from which this Bonnie-and-Clyde style of West German terrorism arose. There are endless scenes of authority figures getting riddled with bullets, or B-M gang members getting riddled with bullets, followed by their surviving comrades watching the television with stunned expressions and then shouting at each other.

That “Complex” in the title appears to promise an analysis of both the structure of the terrorist group and its psychology. But it delivers on neither front. Both singly and in terms of their partnership, Baader and Meinhof are treated superficially and incuriously. Martina Gedeck’s performance is particularly opaque; the film is entirely uninterested in how she felt about abandoning her children for the cause, and, infuriatingly, it completely fudges the moment of her death.

The beginning of everything appears to have been the visit of the shah of Persia to Berlin in 1967. A human rights demonstration – shown as raucous but peaceful – is set upon by pro-shah goons. The police stand idly by while the protesters are assaulted, and their own feeble retaliation is met by a heavy-handed baton charge by armed officers, which leads to a protester being shot dead. The event radicalises a generation, including the journalist Meinhof, whose husband’s adultery has already driven her away from the burgerlich family home. Meanwhile, Baader has been arrested for firebombing a department store, and Meinhof, existentially thrilled by her proximity to direct, violent action, gets involved in his escape. But Gedeck is never given much of an opportunity to show her mental journey towards revolutionary warfare, and the only change in her performance comes in the drift towards mental breakdown during solitary confinement at the very end.

There are some telling and even funny touches. When the gang are invited to Jordan in 1970, to participate in a pro-Palestinian training camp, Baader contemptuously rejects the separate sleeping arrangements suggested by the austere Muslim locals, and both men and women insist on lounging around unclothed, ostentatiously on “strike”, always shrilly insistent on their sexual liberation. When Baader is made to scramble on his belly under barbed wire for a classic training exercise, he simply stands up, pulls aside the wire and shouts that this has nothing to do with the kind of activism he wants – robbing banks. He’s right. But what did he expect? The episode demonstrates that “solidarity” between the secular Marxists of the west and the anti-Israel insurgents of the Middle East was a chimera. Baader appears to take nothing away from the experience, other than a redoubled determination to maintain his anger levels.

In place of a dramatic arc, Edel’s movie offers a long, drawn-out anti-climax: a shapeless rag-bag of violent events. This, arguably, imitates the frustrating messiness of real life, but the movie declines to dig deep into the terrorists’ cult identity and group dynamic. There are plenty of suspect devices and home-made bombs duct-taped to alarm clocks here, but we never find out what makes their creators tick.—Dawn/Guardian News Service