Black-leather glam over-romanticises the real story of this 1970s guerrilla gang The Baader Meinhof Complex (18) dir: Uli Edel

Killing to be cool

The mythology surrounding Baader-Meinhof has long appealed to the fashion-bible aesthetic and the rock 'n' roll sensibility. A style magazine currently on the news-stands marks the release of Uli Edel's film The Baader Meinhof Complex with an article that trumpets the group as "West Germany's coolest killers". There isn't an accompanying picture spread on terrorist chic - "What the swankiest guerrillas are wearing over their explosives belts this season" - but it wouldn't be incongruous if there were. Baader-Meinhof also remains the only terrorist outfit to have inspired an entire concept album (by Luke Haines), and will remain so until we get to hear Gareth Gates's song-cycle about the Red Brigades.

This rock/terrorism interface is largely a matter of fashion. There are few sights as stylish as a morally haywire socialist freedom fighter in a leather jerkin, as Edel well knows. Barely 30 minutes of The Baader Meinhof Complex have elapsed before an impressionable young recruit turns admiringly to Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), and purrs: "Cool leather jacket." He's sharing a bath at the time with Andreas's girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), and Andreas responds to this tableau by leaning forward and cupping Gudrun's breast while the pop-eyed lad gazes on like a choirboy who has just woken up on tour with Led Zeppelin circa 1973. Well, this was Seventies West Germany - to not fondle openly a naked female would have been an unforgivable faux pas.

Andreas has recently been sprung from jail by Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), a left-wing journalist disillusioned with peaceful opposition. "There's no use in praying for a better world," she reasons. "You have to fight for it." She senses a kindred spirit in Andreas and his cohorts, who are serving time for their arson attack on a Frankfurt department store in protest at the Vietnam war, and from this union the Baader-Meinhof group, known formally as the Red Army Faction, is born, launching its long campaign of bombings and assassinations.

The challenge for Edel is how to render this story of idealism curdling into carnage without making it a Hammer of the Gods-style account of the wildest rock band ever to wield Kalashnikovs instead of Rickenbackers. It's one he doesn't overcome. Until now, he has been the go-to guy for sane studies of traumatic experiences (Christiane F., Last Exit to Brooklyn). The problem with The Baader Meinhof Complex is not just that every shoot-out or bank heist is brilliantly choreographed, but that the accompanying material does nothing to complicate or question the thrill we derive from those sequences.

The DNA of any film lies as much in what isn't shown as what is, and Edel and his writer Bernd Eichinger (whose script is based on the book by Stefan Aust) exclude anything that might undermine the Baader-Meinhof brand. Andreas is constantly saying things like "Sexual revolution and anti-imperialism go together - fucking and shooting are the same!" But even terrorists make small-talk, or wash their socks, or burn the toast. When you deny this humdrum context, and focus exclusively on montages of gang members striding away, catwalk-cool, as buildings explode behind them, you blur the line between art and PR.

The odd ray of deprecating realism does break through the fog. When the RAF undergoes military training at an El Fatah desert camp, Andreas loses patience with being machine-gunned while crawling through barbed wire. "We're urban guerrillas, we don't have any desert!" he whinges, bringing to mind Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) objecting to tiny bread and irregularly stuffed olives in This is Spinal Tap.

But The Baader Meinhof Complex shies away from bringing the characters alive as people rather than purely ideologues. There is a haunting image of Ulrike's daughters staring out to sea after she has abandoned them - this, remember, was an unenlightened era when women were forced to choose between motherhood and a career in international terrorism. If the picture had explored even briefly how Ulrike could excise her children from her life as neatly as snipping them out of a family portrait, an invaluable gain could have been made in our comprehension. But faced with the choice between truth and fiction, Edel has taken John Ford's advice and printed the legend. In terms of honesty, his portrayal of the revolutionary lifestyle lags some way behind Citizen Smith's vision of the Tooting Popular Front.

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