Nine MSN
July 22, 2001
By Peter Thompson

The smoke hasn't yet cleared from Pearl Harbor and already there's another war movie breaking out in a cinema near you. But Enemy at the Gates, by French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud, is about a very different battle.

Because of Michael Bay's technically impressive but disappointingly silly movie, the attack on Pearl Harbor looms large in the public imagination right now. But it was little more than a skirmish compared with what was already happening in Europe. And by far the most savage battle of the entire war was yet to come. In the summer of 1942, Hitler poured hundreds of thousands of men and massive armour into the siege of Stalingrad, 1000km south of Moscow. Like Napoleon, he was to suffer a crushing defeat. Many historians call Stalingrad the turning point of the war.

Stalingrad was a strategic link to the oilfields of the southern Caucases. It was also the city's misfortune to bear the Soviet dictator's name so its propaganda value to both sides was enormous. Like Hitler, Stalin committed huge numbers of troops to the battle, but unlike the Germans, they were appallingly ill-equipped. Many of the Soviet soldiers were unarmed and yet, they were sometimes forced by their officers into suicidal charges against enemy positions.

Jean-Jacques Annaud is one of the most individualistic film-makers in the world today. He's made only nine films in 25 years, none resembling another — films as different as The Name of the Rose and Seven Years in Tibet. He's passionate about the magical powers of the camera.

"Cinema has to show you, transport you to places you cannot go to with an airplane ticket. What you can provide with a ticket to a movie house is different — it's something that doesn't exist anymore," says Annaud.

In fact, nothing we see in the film existed before production started. Everything had to be constructed from the ground up, using locations in former East Germany. The scale of Enemy at the Gates is impressive by any standard, but Annaud's real interest is in almost a footnote to the story. He focuses on one soldier out of the two million who died in Stalingrad. Vassili Zaitsev was a peasant from the Ural Mountains with extraordinary skills as a sniper. He's played in the film by the dynamic English actor Jude Law.

"When Vassili arrives in Stalingrad, he's really there as bullet fodder. And he's lucky first of all to have this skill as a sharpshooter but equally lucky, probably more lucky, to be then recognised on his first day by Danilov, this commissar," says Law.

Danilov, a Soviet political officer, played by Joseph Fiennes, sees the chance to turn Vassili into a popular hero. When Nikita Kruschev, no less, is sent in by Stalin to save his city, Danilov proposes that the propaganda machine get behind Vassili.

Jean-Jacques Annaud rejoices in the fact that Vassili really existed and that the primitive media campaign that turned him into a national hero actually helped win the war.

"When you look at history, that Russian victory was absolutely essential — I would be speaking German today and not French — if Stalingrad had been lost. And among the many actions of heroism, this one was so symbolic that today in the city that is called Volgograd — that is, Stalingrad — they have this huge monument about the victory and at the top of this monument is our little guy with his sniper's rifle, like an angel, who made this victory possible," Annaud says.

Enemy at the Gates gets up close and personal, first with the friendship between Vassili and Danilov and then with the arrival of Tania. Again, she's based on a real person and played by the very real Rachel Weisz, but she represents the thousands of Soviet women who took up arms to fight alongside the men.

Annaud isn't one to let the chance of a love story slip through his fingers. Equally, he uses snippets of fact to construct a fatal duel between Vassili and a senior German officer, Konig — that's American actor Ed Harris — said to be the best sniper in the German army.

"The German sharpshooter was apparently the manager of the sharpshooting school of Zoltzen, which was a very prestigious school where you had all those officers with great class and they all drank champagne with beautiful women! A famous cliche, but that's apparently what he was," says Annaud.

Annaud draws out a number of threads from the conflict between Vassili and Konig; one of them Vassili's growing sense that he doesn't measure up to his media image.

The film aims for bold contrasts between the extreme intimacy of the love story and Vassili's duel with Konig and the larger picture, the almost inconceivable horror of the siege itself with its extraordinary brutality and mounting piles of dead.

Enemy at the Gates obviously isn't a film for the fainthearted, although Jean-Jacques Annaud can't be accused of using violence gratuitously. It's wonderful to see a really grand film that doesn't emanate from Hollywood or play directly to American sensibilities. So it's unfortunate to have to say that, rather like Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, some of the drama rings strangely false. Annaud has a quirky style that can be off-putting, but he's a filmmaker of great style as well, and Enemy at the Gates is a spectacular, impressive achievement.