Ain't It Cool News
[SPOILERS]
Hey folks, Harry here... Ya know... this was one of the films I was most looking forward to this year. The battle of Stalingrad is legendarily screwed up and epic beyond words. This director... visually has never been anything short of striking. When I heard of the delay till February... I feared the worst, but this review and this screening seemed to go well... with the movie needing mild cases of trimming at the most it seems. I wonder if they'll try a two theaters in L.A. and New York sort of thing to qualify it... or if they are just going to blow that off? Hmmmmm.... Beware of minor spoilers.... And remember, this is not the finished film...
Some thoughts on "Enemy at the Gates"--from a test screening I attented yesterday:
The beginning of Enemy at the Gates starts off interestingly enough. A silly monologue delivered by an aging grandfather to a young Vasily (Jude Law) aside, the opening sequence conveys the quiet poetry of something that could have been conjured up by Tarkovsky. For half the film this moment seems to haunt Vasily as he recalls the way his grandfather tied a horse to a tree in order to have Vasily aim at an advancing fox.
This memory, whose full resonance isn't revealed until half way through the middle of the film, is at the center of Vasily's being. This film, which will probably be marketed as some sort of love triangle, is first and foremost a film about one man's internal battle. Call it Jean-Jacques Annaud's take on Peter and the Wolf with a little cat-and-mouse action thrown into the mix as Vasily battles with sniper Konig (Ed Harris) to the very end.
It's Russia versus Germany, with Stalingrad as the setting and the battle sequences are reminiscent of all the pyrotechnics that made Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan ring with such ferocious impact. Fortunately for Annaud he doesn't fill his films with stock characters and a poor narrative thrust, so right off the bat this film is leagues ahead of the Spielberg.
When dealing with a film of epic proportions, the director can easily fall into a trap of romanticizing the journey of the hero to ridiculous ends. David Lean, whose best film will always be the subdued Brief Encounter, was such a romantic. Minghella did the same with the laughably melodramatic The English Patient. Here, Annaud views romance as something more primal and dirty. In all honesty I haven't figured out whether this is a flaw or a strong point to the film but its romantic aspects are particularly subdued.
Rachel Weisz, in one of the film's many fine performances, doesn't enter the film until halfway through. When she does it is to instantly engage in one of the film's many taut suspense sequences. This film, for the most part, is an ode to the sniper and most of the film centers around intricate Argento-style set pieces where Vasily and Konig try to desperately kill each other. Vasily has made a name for himself as a killer of Germans and Konig is just the German to end Vasily's streak. Vasily and Tania fall for each other after one harrowing sequence involving mirrors and they consummate their love in the dirtiest of fashions.
My hat goes off to Annaud for staging a sex scene as they should be staged. No surprises here, because this is the man that conjured up an immense amount of eroticism with The Lover. A booming and contrived John Williams score doesn’t accompany this sex sequence, where the actors whisper soft nothings into each other’s ears. This is a sex amongst dirty sleeping bodies, where body parts are erotically and passionately grabbed. It's sex at it's most primal and at its most real.
The film will perhaps be falsely marketed as a love triangle between Vasily, Tania and reporter Danilov (Joseph Fiennes) and this will surely be a falsehood. Again, I don't know if this is a strong point or a fault of the film but the relationship between the three seems a little too subdued. This film is, quite clearly, about the love between Vasily and Tania. Danilov never had a chance with Tania and when he realizes he doesn't have her it is mere disappointed and not the melodrama that would usually accompany such a potentially hokey set-up.
As a cat-and-mouse exercise where two snipers try to out maneuver each other we have a great film here. The film does have its glaring faults though. There are vain attempts to add a much-needed political angle to the film. Bob Hoskins, as Krushev, can easily be edited out of the film and the film would instantly gain a couple of points. A great actor, but his presence serves little purpose when you consider how underwritten his part is. Additionally, we have many characters in the film that are traitors. The film fails to focus on the full dynamics behind this and in the end we are a bit confused as to who is on what side (remember, even a double-agent has one country he is partial too).
As a suspense builder the film gets many kudos, but it doesn't particularly give Ed Harris much to work with. He says less here than he did in Truman Show and his character is one-dimensionally drawn. Also, the film's ending is unwatchable. A taut, suspenseful film with beautifully erotic underpinnings is lost in the end with a cheap voice-over. Without saying too much, and fully acknowledging that this ending will be completely erased, let's just say that the ending is about as anti-climactic as your going to get. I wasn't asking for a slow motion scene where lovers hugged after the war atop a snow-capped mountain. What we get is something akin to watching a movie about Romeo and Juliet and the final image is of falling show with a voice-over telling us, "Romeo and Paris hated each other and if you go to Verona you can see knitting factory that possibly served as the inspiration for the mausoleum." It's so ridiculous that it's confounding.
Here's hoping some changes are made because we have a potentially great movie here. The film has too subdued of a nature with a moderate identity crisis. Danilov and Vasily’s relationship is heading toward buddy picture terrain but all contact between the two is abandoned about half way through, as well as all the odd (yet interesting) moments of homoeroticism, and then we enter the cat-and-mouse terrain to then delve into the romance segment. Still, as the film stands, I already see it doing well Oscar time. Of course, if not released this year then its chances might be ruined.
Repulsion
October 20, 2000
