A scene from Uli Edel’s 2008 film, The Baader Meinhof Complex. (Constantin Film Produktion)
The distinction between the words “movie” and “film” is also a distinction between those who go to the movies for fun and those who watch films to deliver aesthetic edicts, the film critics. Both of these camps seem to agree that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a great movie, but also one hell of a film.
It has an all-star cast featuring Sean Penn, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Benicio del Toro. It has a cast of rising, heretofore unknown actors featuring Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor. It melds political satire, political relevance, and political omens relevant to our current time. It holds car chases, drugs, explosions, and sexual tension in equal measure. For some, it is even “pronatalist” in its overarching message. Mostly, however, it is a movie about leftist political ideology that goes over the top in terrorist actions and violent imagery. Right out of the gate, in fact, the viewer is treated to a quick succession of frames and scenes in which heists, explosions, and the fine art of wiring bombs are blended with erotic dialogue and sex between DiCaprio (playing the urban terrorist Bob Ferguson) and Taylor (his accomplice in violent revolution, Perfidia Beverly Hills).
It has been a long time—decades, even?—since a major U.S. film director has ventured into the genre territory of left-wing terrorism. Meanwhile, the international film world has never been shy in the least, turning out a slew of works that sometimes veer toward romanticizing, even idolizing, some key figures of left-leaning political violence. Early in One Battle After Another, director Thomas goes “meta” by having Ferguson watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s celebrated film portrayal of the Algerian uprising against colonial France, The Battle of Algiers (1966), from the screen of a hideaway television set. Pontecorvo’s nearly sixty-year-old film is rightly judged a high point in films about revolutionary causes, so much so that it was often mistaken for a documentary. It is not the only such film, though. So if you harbor secret longings for the romance of leftist political causes doing battle with “The Man,” but without the consequences of violent action and even murderous mayhem such causes reap, you have plenty else to choose from:
Sacco & Vanzetti (1971), directed by Giuliano Montaldo, 121 minutes: Your grandparents may not still be alive to remind you, but before the Red Scare, it was anarchists and Italian immigrants who had nativist Americans in an uproar over “unchecked immigration” (sound familiar?) and “lawless criminals.” Depending on who you ask among those who still remember, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were either innocent scapegoats or guilty as hell of murdering two people in a Massachusetts bank heist. Montaldo clearly favors the former verdict, and who could blame him during an era of international student protest against the Vietnam War, when righteous fury against unjust violence was at its height. The courtroom scenes may be overly long, but if that drags you down, the soundtrack, by Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone, cannot be faulted.
Patty Hearst (1988), directed by Paul Schrader, 108 minutes: Basically, the leftist terrorist as clueless trust-funder, aided, abetted, and abducted by clueless White kids fueled by violent stupidity and White guilt. Schrader plays it straight in both the film frame and script about the real-life story of America’s most famous terrorist figure. The portrait drawn here of leftist terrorism is mostly one of a moral vacuum, but also more than a few ridiculous moments, chief of which is a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army passing for Black in front of a mirror. Worth it, though, for Natasha Richardson’s starring role, which makes Hearst’s confusion and fear real enough to feel.
Best of Youth (2003), directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, 6 hours 6 minutes. This one requires a bit of an investment, time-wise, but its dividends pay off, and then some. Following the lives of two Italian brothers during the “Years of Lead” from 1968 to 1982, when students were drawn to revolutionary protests and, eventually, terrorism, this series finds its political heart in Giulia, a young mother to one of the brothers who leaves her young daughter for a life underground with Italy’s Red Brigade. The personal becomes political, which becomes personal once more in a drama more interested in terms of grace and forgiveness between parent and child, a theme that also resonates in One Battle After Another.
United Red Army (2007), directed by Kõji Wakamatsu, 190 minutes: Thousands of Japanese students went absolutely, all-out nuts for leftist, revolutionary terrorism in the 1960s and early 1970s. Here to tell you the crazy, creepy odyssey of Japan’s premiere leftist paramilitary group is director Wakamatsu in a film that spares no detail of their deranged violence. Some scenes, foremost among them the group leaders forcing militant initiates to prove their loyalty to the revolutionary cause by hitting themselves repeatedly in the face, are extremely hard to watch. Otherwise, you can marvel at the dedication of an “army” so convinced of their cause that they think nothing of holding random people hostage and taking on entire battalions of police in a ski mountain resort.
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) directed by Uli Edel, 2 hours 30 minutes: West Germany’s Baader Meinhof cell of Red Army Faction devotees were very loud, very violent, and very cocky. In this fast-moving chronicle of their fanatical tear of murder and mayhem across post-war Germany and into Jordan, where their members tried to find cohorts of sympathy in the cause of Palestinian liberation, Edel mixes tons of newsreel footage, lots of bloody shootings, and no end of synchronized explosions on right-wing newspaper offices and U.S. military bases. On occasion, the action halts for reflection—“If we want student terrorism to stop, we must acknowledge the objective nature of some political problems,” opines one German government prosecutor—but by the time protagonists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof meet their grim ends in prison, the mood overall is appropriately nihilistic and dour. The viewer cannot help but think, “Those ’70s-era German leftists were fierce, had great marksmanship under pressure, but were also hella insane. What were they killing for, again?!”
