# Enemy at the Gates (2001)

### reviewed by
JONATHAN RICHARDS

ENEMY AT THE GATES Written (with Alain Godard) and Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud

    UA North     R      131 min

World War II is back with a vengeance. On May 25th Pearl Harbor will be bombed at a theater near you. In August, Captain Corelli's Mandolin will strike up its tune. And Santa Fe screens this week feature two takes on that war from a Russian perspective.

Incomparably the better of the two is Elem Klimov's 1985 classic Come and See, one of the most harrowing war movies ever made. Set in Byelorussia in 1943, it experiences the horrors of that war through the eyes of young Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko) who joins the partisan resistance against the Nazi invasion. The Germans conducted a scorched earth campaign in Byelorussia, destroying 638 villages and massacring their inhabitants. "Inferior races carry the microbe of communism," sneers a German officer. "Your nation has no right to exist."

What begins as almost a game for Florya, searching on a beach for guns with a friend, evolves into horrors so great that the boy suffers a trauma-induced progeria, aging decades in a few months. "I ended up filming a lightened-up version of the truth," Klimov has said. "Had I included everything I knew, even I could not have watched it." There are also scenes of lyrical beauty. A remarkable montage at the end of newsreel footage run in reverse suggests that if we could only go back far enough maybe we could discover what went wrong and set it right.

Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet) has reconstructed the battle of Stalingrad, winnowing it down to a couple of ace snipers (Jude Law for the Russians, Ed Harris for the Boche) duking it out as if their respective armies had agreed to let the war's outcome be decided by their duel. Law plays Vassili, a sort of stepped-down Sgt. York, a country boy with a sharpshooter's eye. He's built up, sports hero-style, by Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), the army political officer who writes pamphlets about him. Both of them fall in love with fellow-fighter Tanya (Rachel Weisz), and there is never a moment when we care about any of this. The production, with its ruined city and wall-to-wall dead bodies, is impressive, but Annaud lacks the breadth of visual language that made Spielberg's vision of Armageddon so devastating. The characters and the story never engage the imagination. Annaud shows a weakness for the truly bad scene which casts a pall of suspicion over his better moments.

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