The Sunday Times
January 7, 2001
By Garth Pearce

A love story set during the battle for Stalingrad, Enemy at the Gates should make Rachel Weisz a household name. She's certainly not short of star quality, as Garth Pearce discovers

Rachel Weisz has always made an impact. From the moment of her film debut five years ago, stretched out topless in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, it was clear she was never going to be one of those demure British faces, set to fade quietly into the background. Just ask her co-stars.

Actors like Alessandro Nivola, with whom she appeared in a small-budget British movie, I Want You, and Neil Morrissey, who worked with her on the television film My Summer With Des, have fallen under her spell after the cameras stopped rolling. Her current boyfriend? The Oscar-winning director of American Beauty and Hollywood's man of the moment, Sam Mendes. But nothing quite compares with the impression that she will soon be making on audiences around the world in her forthcoming film Enemy at the Gates.

Weisz, 29, playing a Russian soldier, Tania Chernova, stars alongside two of Britain's most sought-after young actors, Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes, in what is expected to be a stunning film version of the bestselling book Stalingrad, by the historian Antony Beevor. The film, set during the worst weeks of slaughter in the 180-day siege of Stalingrad, which ended in February 1943 with the surprise defeat of the German army, is one of the most eagerly anticipated of the new year.

More pertinently, it could do for Weisz what The Talented Mr Ripley has already done for Law and what Shakespeare in Love did for Fiennes: establish her at the forefront of Hollywood's Brit-pack. Although Weisz will not be drawn on the probable impact of her role, she clearly knows it's a winner, having seen a preview of an almost-finished version.

"It is an amazing film," she reports. "The war is realistic and distressing. But the love story, about friendship and betrayal, gives it an emotional spine. It is also about civilians trying to save their city, up against trained Nazi soldiers. They crawled out of the rubble after they had been bombed - women, children, old people - and fought until they dropped. Life expectancy was about 12 hours in battle, and they all accepted they were going to die."

If the film is only half as good as the script, by the director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose and Seven Years in Tibet) and Alain Godard, then the impact should be considerable. Law's character of crack sniper Vassili Zaitsev, taught from boyhood by his grandfather to shoot wolves for their skins, is brought to prominence as a propaganda tool by a political officer, Danilov, played by Fiennes, to give the hard-pressed Russians a hero of their own.

Zaitsev is so successful at shooting German officers, stirring those in the besieged city to greater efforts, that the Nazis send in an expert of their own: Major Konig (Ed Harris), the director of the sniper school in Zossen, a well-heeled senior officer with a liking for champagne and gilt-tipped cigarettes. Danilov is able to observe: "A nobleman from Bavaria who hunts stags against a shepherd boy from the Urals who poaches wolves. It is more than a confrontation between two nations; it is the essence of a class struggle."

Weisz's character, a beautiful, well-educated, German-speaking Russian, takes up arms when her civilian parents are captured, deported and shot. Law's sniper hero and Fiennes's political manipulator are both entranced, but try not to let their close friendship get in the way of the other's attempts to win her love. There is emotional turmoil among the conflict as she makes clear her preference for the sniper, as he prepares for a series of battles with the Nazi major. Fiennes's character then faces a choice: betrayal of his friend or self-sacrifice.

"It was," says Weisz, "the most physically demanding role of my life. Ironically, the filming was in Germany, near Berlin, where part of the crumbled city of Stalingrad was re-created, with trenches and craters. It was very cold and dirty, and each day started before dawn. But so what? This was just a movie. We had comfortable beds to sleep in, fresh food and showers to wash ourselves down. The true conditions suffered by those at the time were shocking."