If Not Us, Who?
A portrait of Baader-Meinhof militant Gudrun Ensslin and her lover Bernward Vesper, the film covers territory already familiar from the broader period panorama of Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex. (...) [T]his film’s concentration on two key figures – one notorious, the other less so – allows for greater psychological depth, and more time studying the gradual emergence of the couple’s radicalism and its attendant contradictions.
(...) Despite the intimate tenor of this story of amour fou, the film is far more considered than the young-militants-in-love story that it could easily have been. The leads are incarnated in persuasively contradictory detail, with Diehl commandingly evoking Bernward’s tormented psyche and eventual descent into despair. But it is to Lauzemis that the film really belongs, with her unsettling portrayal of Ensslin as a sexually and politically passionate woman, as well as a habitual self-harmer who is as traumatized as Bernward by the sins of their parents’ generation.
(...) Veiel’s script displays impressive cogency in examining the relations between words, beliefs and action in a cultural context that is as influenced by literary as by political allegiances.
Jonathan Romney, Screen International
Original title: Wer wenn nicht wir
Duration: 124 min
Dialogue: German
Subtitles: Finnish and Swedish
Age limit: K15
