Brazilian Review
April 2001
By Kleber Mendonça Filho
Translated by Luciana

The "art of war" basically consists of opponents trying to hit one another to death. Whether they throw stones or bombs, it doesn't matter: the idea is that you have indeed to stop the other. Enemy at the Gates, by Jean-Jacques Annaud, refines the idea and transforms it into a 2 hour battle between two men who show war as the art of technique working to enable them to kill at distance. The result is an old-fashioned war movie, slightly based on facts and using enough technique to make its modern clothing conceal its square structure.

Snipers and franctireurs have already played important parts in Saving Private Ryan, by Steven Spielberg, and especially Full Metal Jacket by Stanley Kubrick, where the shots reverberated with poetry. Annaud's movie is not really poetic, but the French director knows the grandeur of its characters. Snipers are interesting, charismatic as death itself. In Enemy at the Gates the terror is in the hands of a Russian soldier, Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law, from "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), and a German officer, Major Konig (Ed Harris, from "Pollock"). Vassili shows his skills with a rifle in an excellent sequence of death and bloodshed that establishes his dexterity and that will have an effect on the Russian army, starving and discouraged by the Nazi terror.

Vassili's efficiency with his rifle will be used as war propaganda, working as a moral booster within the troops, as well as frightening Nazi officers who see their heads and helmets at Vassili's mercy.

In order to face the Russian, who grew up hunting wolves with his grandfather, the Nazis bring Konig, another ace when it comes to shooting. The battles of patience and technique between both are carefully composed in widescreen on the sets, especially in a destroyed factory -- excellent work of production design. Annaud works in such a way that the audience knows exactly the possible angles where Vassili and Konig might shoot and kill.

Enemy at the Gates, which opened the last Berlin Festival as a German production, works well from the beginning, when it places the audience in the middle of the crazy bloodshed in the siege of Stalingrad, Soviet Union, in 1942. Curiously, the film opens with a major massacre involving anti-aircraft artillery and then elaborates death as a result of millimetric details.

Annaud is a director with epic aspirations and, in this field, his film has a great impact, especially during the first thirty minutes, resonant with shots and mortars, along with the score by the probably deaf James Horner. Just like in "Quest for Fire" and "The Name of the Rose", Annaud shows an inclination to film people in the cold, making it clear that Stalingrad was no earthly paradise.

Is that why the characters are so cold? In this film, they are like small figures inhabiting elaborated sets. Vassili, for example, works much more for the strength of his rifle, while Konig is a villain in the great "killer android" tradition. Who is Konig, besides a cold, smoking sniper? Harris plays him almost with closed eyes. There is also a weak love triangle involving Vassili, Tania (Rachel Weisz) and Danilov (Joseph Fiennes).

Enemy at the Gates is a technically perfect entertainment for anyone who bets on a nostalgic audience in terms of war movies. It contains traditional elements from this epic genre, especially the spectacle of death itself.

Film seen at the "Cinema da Fundação", Recife, April 2001