Enemy At The Gates [Import anglais]

On paper this film has the utterly compelling simplicity of a spaghetti western, with Jude Law's brave but talented farm-boy sniper and soviet hero pitched against Ed Harris's taciturn and masterly Nazi sniper, stringing out a long and complicated cat-and-mouse game among the astounding sights of Stalingrad in ruins. And, in fact, whatever criticism I have of the film, the premise and visual execution are simply so compelling as to outweigh them all.

That said, I wonder if the apparently French-speaking director was really able to elicit convincing performances from a first-rate cast...? I suspect a director with better English might have trashed and retaken a lot of the dialogue scenes that ended up in the final cut here. The delivery of the not-terrible dialogue is often hokey and stilted, and only the masterly Ed Harris seems to have a consistent handle on his character.

There is something pleasingly old-fashioned about this war-movie, and it seems as if it could have been made in the late 1960s high-budget war-movie revival, inasmuch as the accent is on strong story and character rather than tortuous and ambiguous issues of morality, which latter approach by no means hampered 'saving Private Ryan' (it was the poor execution of a worthwhile idea that did that).

The only grating modern intrusion is the uncomfortable grafting-on of a ***VERY*** weak love-triangle thread, but this seems to have been imposed on the film-makers by some focus-group obsessed, now-fired idiots in head office, and the director wisely makes as little of it as he possibly can without utterly cutting it out, which you get the feeling he would like to do. It was all pretty unnecessary since the three main characters are interesting enough to justify their screen-time without this cold contrivance.

On the 'love' note, the film contains an extraordinarily erotic love-scene between Rachel Weicz's and Jude Law's characters, which takes place in a full-to-capacity bombed-out doss-shelter, elbow to elbow with legions of weary, indifferent and half-asleep soldiers.

The absence of Americans or Brits from the character-cast, combined with there being no particular cultural axe to grind with the Russians as a race (at least while this film was being made), leaves the film-makers free of the onerous task of having to massage fragile American egos/sensibilities regarding WW2 - it's simply not an issue, as there isn't a Yank or a Limey in sight (until you check the actors playing the roles, that is), so the film is refreshingly free of xenophobia and condescension, particularly for an American-made war-film.

I must agree with another reviewer here who feared that the similar poster-campaigns for this film and the execrable 'Pearl Harbor' probably put a lot of people off seeing this; at the time 'Enemy At The Gates' was in cinemas, it put ME off - based on the advertising artwork, I was convinced it was from the same producers as 'Pearl Harbor'.

The 'accent problem' in war films and historical drama in general is a very old one, almost always solved -as in 'Gladiator'- by EVERYONE adopting an English accent (even the Americans actors). That is mostly the solution taken in 'Enemy', though with wildly varying results between the actors. However it was very good to see Bob Hoskins playing someone else besides Bob Hoskins, and really putting the effort into the voice-work, if not the accent - I guess he at least had tapes of Nikita Khrushchev to steer him away from either of his two accents (Cockney and 'Dick Van Dyke'), and he is a chilling presence in the film. Ron Perlman's accent also crosses the Atlantic-if not the equator- several times before he is put out of his misery - but he is otherwise excellent as ever, and all too briefly showcased here.

Rachel Weicz is as winsome as ever (and unusually touching), Jude Law alternating between hypnotising and hypnotised and Joseph Fiennes - well, he showed up on set and knew his lines most of the time, so lets be generous here. Like Mark Wahlberg, he always looks to me like the otherwise-unemployable nephew of one of the film's financiers, but even he has his moments here, particularly his last ones of the film.

This is a film I would love to have seen Kubrick make, particularly in the 1960s, though it would perhaps have been unbearably dark.