February 7, 2001
By Alastair Macdonald
BERLIN (Reuters) - A German-made multinational blockbuster about the battle of Stalingrad launched the Berlin film festival Wednesday into 12 manic days of stars and producers pushing new movies and claims to next month's Oscars.
Enemy at the Gates features Britain's Jude Law and American Ed Harris as dueling Russian and German snipers in the hard-won Soviet victory that turned the tide of World War Two. It is also a love story, as Law and Rachel Weisz's woman soldier consummate their passion in the heat of the winter battle.
The film was directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, best known for cosmopolitan hits like The Name of the Rose and Seven Years in Tibet.
It is one of the most expensive German films ever made, with a widely reported budget of $80 million, and was produced at the old east German studios at Babelsberg just outside Berlin.
The film from the newly renovated center, first made famous by the likes of Fritz Lang in the 1920s and 30s, is being touted as heralding a revival in big-budget movie-making in Europe and breaking the Hollywood monopoly on cinematic epics.
"Germany is expensive but Germany is reliable," Annaud said, praising facilities and crews in Germany that let him create the sweeping, blood-soaked action panoramas that open the film, recalling Steven Spielberg's start to Saving Private Ryan.
Law said he found making the film in Germany, with extras who were German or from Berlin's big Russian community, a very emotional experience, hearing their own family stories of war.
"That rooted it," he said.
"I've never seen extras behave like that in my life," said Weisz, best known for her role in The Mummy. Weisz plays Tania, an educated young woman drawn to volunteer for the front.
War Up Close And Personal
While rejecting suggestions his tale is a fanciful treatment of the real horrors of the 1942-43 battle - it is based on Russian and German eyewitness accounts collated in a book of the same name in the 1970s - Annaud said it was important for him not to tell a dry saga but a personal, human drama.
"I'm only interested in telling the story of the battle of Stalingrad through the eyes of individuals who went through this," Annaud said.
"I don't believe you can make a film without concentrating on heroes. My favorite shot is focusing on the eyes of the protagonists. That is the most beautiful landscape."
After the first harrowing scenes of Soviet troops being rushed under fire across the river Volga and into battle - with only one rifle between two - the film homes in on two duels: one of war, the other of love. Both are equally deadly.
Law's naive, shepherd-boy sharpshooter, Vasily Zaitsev, plays in both - against Harris's patrician German officer sent to kill him, and against Joseph Fiennes's red commissar, the propagandist who makes Zaitsev famous, for Tania's affections.
"You get a distillation of the conflict between two nations down to a duel between two men," Fiennes told Reuters.
"One of the things about this film is that there are no villains at Stalingrad. Everyone was a victim, including the Germans," said Bob Hoskins, who plays Nikita Khrushchev, the political boss at the battle who later ran the Kremlin.
Oscar Contenders
While Enemy at the Gates received the honor of opening the Berlinale, which ranks behind Cannes and alongside Venice among Europe's top festivals, it is not among the 24 films in competition for the Golden Bear award for best movie.
Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-contender Traffic, with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones depicting Washington's losing war against the drugs trade, will lead those off Thursday.
Sixteen international feature films will make their world premieres, as will many smaller-budget pictures and documentaries among the 300 or so movies on show.
Britain's Kate Winslet of Titanic fame will be promoting her latest film, Philip Kaufman's Quills, a potential Oscar contender built around the French writer the Marquis de Sade.
Hannibal, the sequel to Silence of the Lambs, will also be showing, with lead actor Anthony Hopkins due in Berlin. Sean Connery will push his Finding Forrester, the story of a reclusive writer who mentors a tough inner-city boy.
Kirk Douglas, 84, will receive a Golden Bear for lifetime achievement, and French actress Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp are due in town for the screening of the comic fable Chocolat, for which Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom is eyeing an Oscar.
