Taken from http://www.epipoca.com.br/
By Rubens Edwald Filho
Translated by Luciana

This film opened the Berlin Festival 2001 and was not a success in the United States. It has a more European sensibility and is made in English by the French director Annaud ("Quest for Fire", "The Name of the Rose", "The Lover", "The Bear". It tells a real story: the screenwriters, in this case also the director, had access to the Russian archives that told the legendary stories of Vassili Zaitsev, (sometimes with contradictory accounts), although the original title has been taken from a book by William Craig (not credited). The result is more a suspense movie than war itself, with interesting moments. It is, however, damaged by an excessively long account and by some banal dialogues and clichés. In spite of that, the overall result pleased me.

It is evident that all the initial sequence, shot in Germany, has been inspired by "Saving Private Ryan" and, even though it is quite strong, it is still inferior. The movie shows, more as a background than anything else, the famous Battle for Stalingrad (1942-1943), a turning point in World War II, when Hitler's Nazi war machine suffered its first defeat from the Soviet army, which bravely resisted in a city almost totally destroyed. For anyone looking for a more accurate account of the facts, it is better to see "Stalingrad" by Joseph Vilsmaier, a German movie from 1993 which reproduced the facts with more emphasis. In Annaud's movie, you don't even get to see the city and its inhabitants properly, and they are used merely as a background to what really interests the director -- telling the story of the duel between two franctireurs.

At any rate, in the first sequence you can already observe the massacre when they try to cross the Volga, and Soviet soldiers shooting their own troops, coldly executing them as deserters. Among them is a young man who came from the Urals where he had learned to be a hunter with his grandfather, Vassili (English actor Jude Law, Academy Award nominee for "The Talented Mr. Ripley", who once more uses his beautiful blue eyes). After escaping the massacre almost by chance, Vassili meets Danilov (Joseph Fiennes, from "Shakespeare in Love", also English, since for some reason all the Russian characters are played by British actors), an officer in charge of the propaganda who comes up with the idea of making Vassili an idol, a hero, and thus boosting the moral among the troops under siege.

Thus, they make a big fuss each time he kills a Nazi officer, for the joy of the Soviet chief trying to control the catastrophe. In this case Nikita Kruschev (played by another English actor, Bob Hoskins) who, as we remember, would later get to be the Soviet Prime Minister, after being the first to denounce Stalin's immoderation.

There isn't an attempt to deepen the character of the hero, always shown superficially as a cute, simple-minded young man who ends up forming an affected love triangle when he meets a Jewish intellectual young woman (Rachel), also involved in the fight. Obviously, they both have an affair that greatly displeases Danilov (the low point in the movie is Danilov's speech against communism, where Annaud wastes Fiennes' talent in a reasoning that is not justifiable for the character and for that time, exalting the differences and not the equality).

But after twenty minutes of screening, the film grows when its best actor appears, Ed Harris, who plays the Nazi officer sent to kill Vassili (Harris was one of the nominees for best actor in the Academy Awards for "Pollock", which he also directed). A charismatic and discreet presence, speaking as little as possible and dropping a number of implications, even in his relationship with the boy who shines his boots and later becomes a spy.

This is the essence of the movie, when Vassili is no longer the hunter but rather is hunted, in three or four sequences which are almost all visual, with a lot of suspense and in which they face each other (something that almost turns into a western duel). Since the lamentable phenomenon of the franctireur is still nowadays a tragical fact (in the Balkans and Sarajevo), this increases the intensity of the situation.

Directed by Annaud in his usual way, that is, without a particular style, better in the visual than in the dialogues, "Enemy at the Gates" is far from being a great war movie, but it works as a suspense, as long as its evident flaws are excused.