Film Review | ARTE

P.H. Bloecker | bloecker.wordpress.com

Munich as Character: The Visual Record

From my vantage point in Burleigh Waters, Queensland, watching this French-German co-production from 1981, I was immediately struck by something that professional critics apparently overlooked: Heynemann and his cinematographer have given us an extraordinarily faithful visual document of Munich in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This matters more than it might seem. Too many political thrillers of this period — particularly French productions shot partly on location in West Germany — use the foreign city as a vague backdrop, a collection of signifiers: a beer stein here, a Bundesrepublik numberplate there. Heynemann does something more honest. He lets Munich breathe.

The light rail. Anyone who knows Munich’s Straßenbahn network will recognise the trams threading through the film’s street sequences — the articulated cars of the period, the overhead cabling, the particular geometry of the stops. These are not dressed sets. Heynemann shot in the city, and the city responded by being exactly itself. For an Australian viewer in 2025, watching a Munich tram in 1981 is not nostalgia — it is archaeology. Urban infrastructure carries more social history than any quantity of dialogue.

The cars. This is where the film becomes, unintentionally, a museum on wheels. Consider what passes through frame during the Munich sequences: a Renault 4, that most democratic of French automobiles, boxy and cheerful and absurdly practical; a Citroën 2CV, the machine that embodied an entire philosophy of useful ugliness; a VW Beetle, so embedded in the visual grammar of West Germany that it barely registers as a vehicle — it is more like weather; and, of course, various iterations of Mercedes-Benz, which in the West Germany of that period functioned simultaneously as status symbol, family transport, and police specification.

What Heynemann grasps, whether consciously or not, is that in a film about political violence and state assassination, the ordinariness of the street environment is itself a statement. Birgitt Haas is not operating in some James Bond netherworld of unmarked vans and safe houses staffed by Teutonic automatons. She moves through a city of Renault 4s and 2CVs, of students and workers and tram passengers who know nothing of her. The banality of the visual environment is the point. Terror, the film quietly insists, lives in the same streets as the school run.

This is, of course, the central historical fact about the RAF — the Rote Armee Fraktion — that the Federal Republic found so difficult to process. Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin were not monsters from outside the social order. They had come from within it, had ridden those same trams, had grown up among those same Beetles and Renaults. Heynemann’s Munich, precisely because it looks so lived-in and ordinary, carries this subtext without labouring it.

Baumann and Eric: The Film’s Moral Centre

Jean Rochefort as Baumann is, quite simply, this film’s most important achievement.

Baumann is not an agent. He is a civilian — a man recently abandoned by his wife, emotionally hollowed out, and therefore dangerously available for manipulation. The secret agency “Hangar,” run by the sardonic and morally flexible Athanase (Philippe Noiret, doing what Noiret always did: making ruthlessness look like pragmatism), identifies Baumann as the perfect instrument. He resembles Eric, one of their actual agents, closely enough for a substitution scheme: Baumann will be used to establish contact with Birgitt Haas, to make himself known to her, to begin the emotional approach — and then Eric will step in and finish the job.

The Doppelgänger logic here is genuinely unsettling, and Rochefort plays it with extraordinary restraint. Baumann does not know, at first, what he is. He is recruited under false pretences, briefed partially, and nudged toward a woman whose name he does not yet recognise. Rochefort gives us a man who is trying to feel something again after emotional catastrophe — who is, in the most literal sense, available. His openness, his vulnerability, is weaponised by people who regard it as a logistical convenience rather than a human condition.

The scene in which the full mechanism of the substitution begins to clarify — when Baumann starts to understand that he is a warm-up act, a decoy, a man being walked toward a precipice by people with lanyards and expense accounts — is one of the film’s genuine dramatic achievements. Rochefort does not play this as a revelation. He plays it as a confirmation of something he perhaps always suspected about himself: that he is the kind of man things are done to, not with.

Eric, the actual operative who will complete what Baumann has begun, is a different order of person entirely — controlled, purposive, professionally blank. The contrast between the two men is the film’s sharpest dramatic instrument. Baumann has an interior life. Eric has a mission. In a state that needs someone killed quietly, it is immediately clear which of these two attributes is more useful.

The Snow Departure: Cinema at Its Best

There is one sequence in this film that I would hold against any comparable scene in the European political thriller of its era. I am speaking of the departure by Cessna — a small aircraft on a snow-covered airstrip near Munich, in winter conditions, the ice-dusted runway barely distinguishable from the surrounding white ground.

It is a brief scene. It lasts perhaps two minutes. Almost nothing is said. And it is, cinematically, close to perfect.

The choice of a Cessna — not a sleek intelligence-service jet, not a helicopter with military aesthetics — is precisely right. A Cessna on an icy Bavarian strip is modest, civilian, plausible. It is the kind of aircraft in which things actually happen, as opposed to the kind in which they are dramatised. The snow on the ground and the grey Bavarian sky above create a visual register that is simultaneously beautiful and threatening — the landscape as moral weather, which is a quintessentially Central European cinematographic tradition running from German Expressionism through to Wim Wenders.

But what the scene achieves above all is a quality of imminence without announcement. Something is about to happen. The machinery of the operation is moving. The Cessna lifts from the ice, and with it goes the last possibility of reversal, of rescue, of the plan being abandoned. The visual simplicity — white ground, grey sky, small machine, cold air — carries the film’s entire moral weight at that moment more effectively than any quantity of dialogue could manage.

It is the kind of filmmaking that reminds you why images existed before words in cinema, and why they still do the heavier lifting when a director has the confidence to let them.

The French Team: Where Comedy Enters Uninvited

Now for the problems.

The Hangar team — the French intelligence operatives, led by Noiret’s Athanase — are presented with a tonal inconsistency that ultimately undermines the film’s credibility. In their Paris-based scenes, particularly, Heynemann allows a register that can only be described as inadvertent slapstick. The bureaucratic jostle, the office politics, the anxious middle management of state murder — all of this is played with a humid, self-satisfied Frenchness that sits oddly alongside the film’s more serious aspirations.

It is not that the satirical intention is wrong. State assassination is banal, and the men who organise it do have the faces of mid-level functionaries worrying about their pension entitlements. But satire requires edge. What Heynemann gives us instead, in these sequences, is something closer to La Cage aux Folles doing intelligence work — bumbling, slightly sweaty, more interested in internal politics than in the moral abyss they are cheerfully administering.

Noiret himself escapes this problem, because Noiret was incapable of being entirely unserious. But the scenes in which his subordinates plot and counter-plot and jockey for position have the feel of a different, lesser film bleeding through — a film where the joke is always available and the consequences are never quite real.

This tonal humidity — the word seems right, suggesting a kind of atmospheric looseness, a failure of compression — works against everything the Baumann/Eric strand achieves. A film cannot simultaneously ask us to feel the full moral weight of what is being done to Baumann and invite us to find his handlers slightly ridiculous. The emotional registers cancel each other.

The Finale: A Screenplay That Collapses

And then there is the ending.

I will be direct: the introduction of Baumann’s wife’s dead lover as the mechanism of the film’s resolution is one of the least defensible pieces of screenwriting in the French political thriller of the 1980s. It arrives from nowhere, it explains nothing that needed explaining, and it closes the film with a plot logic so arbitrary that it reads less like a narrative decision than like a deadline problem.

The film has spent ninety minutes building a structure of genuine complexity — the Hangar operation, the Baumann substitution, Birgitt’s gradual entanglement, the Eric identity overlay, the question of what Birgitt knows and when she knows it. This is a web with real moral tension in it. The Doppelgänger scheme raises questions that matter: about identity, about the instrumentalisation of human feeling, about whether a state that murders by proxy is distinguishable from the terrorists it is eliminating.

None of these questions are answered by the dead lover subplot. They are simply abandoned in favour of a complication that the screenplay appears to have introduced in order to force a resolution it could not otherwise engineer. The final shootout — with its mechanics of coincidence and its sudden population of characters whose relationship to the film’s actual concerns is tangential at best — does not conclude the film’s argument. It simply stops it.

The German title, Der inszenierte Mord, promised a film about the staging of murder, about performance and substitution as political technology. The ending delivers instead a conventional genre climax that could have closed any moderately competent thriller of the period. It is not merely a disappointment. It is a betrayal of the film’s own best instincts.

What Remains

What remains, after the bad finale and the tonal inconsistencies, is a film with a remarkable visual record of a city at a particular historical moment, two performances of genuine distinction, and one sequence — the Cessna lifting from the icy strip — that I will not forget quickly.

For anyone who lived through the Deutscher Herbst of 1977 — who remembers the poisoned atmosphere, the suspicion, the way the Federal Republic seemed to be holding its breath — Il faut tuer Birgitt Haas has a residual authenticity that transcends its narrative failings. It understood, at least in its bones, that the story of the RAF was not a story about monsters. It was a story about what happens when a society produces people who believe that violence is the only remaining political language — and about what a state will do, quietly and without announcement, in response.

That is not a small understanding. Heynemann deserved a better screenplay with which to carry it.

Rating: 6 out of 10. For the tram, the Renault 4, the Cessna in the snow, and Jean Rochefort doing what only Jean Rochefort could do.

P.H. Bloecker writes from Burleigh Waters, Queensland. He spent 43 years in classrooms across Germany, Namibia, and Australia — including Berlin in the autumn of 1977, when the events that inspired this film were not yet history.