Baader-Meinhof film divides Germany

Towards the end of The Baader-Meinhof Complex, a new film about Germany's infamous urban guerrillas of the 1970s, a car in a leafy suburb is held up by a group of four young people, two men and two women. They approach, pull out machine-guns and pump round after round into a driver and a minder: 119 bullets, precisely.

The scene, the most drawn-out in a film full of graphic violence, is sickening. The men's corpses soon become nothing more than twitching sacks for target practice. The leading industrialist whose car it was is taken alive as kidnap barter.

Uli Edel's reconstruction of the life, deeds - over ten years - and ultimate failure of the Baader-Meinhof gang is doing brisk box-office in Germany, and stops at nothing to be historically accurate. In that 1977 slaughter, the police

indeed tallied 119 bullets. If you have the stomach to count, that's what you'll see in the film.

Much of the dialogue and the articulation of the gang's main ideas - anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism and, above all and most lethally, armed struggle - are taken from contemporary documents and eyewitness reports.

Protagonists Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin (pictured on next page with Baader) are brought brilliantly to life by three of Germany's most charismatic actors: Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck and Johanna Wokalek.

But there is something a little too sexy for comfort about their depiction of the gang and this has snagged nerves amongst many Germans, now in their 50s and 60s, who remember Baader-Meinhof (or the Red Army Faction - 'RAF' - as they called themselves