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3.0 out of 5 stars Lost souls in France's last colonial war, October 28, 2009

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Trevor Willsmer (London, England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Intimate Enemies ( L' Ennemi intime ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - France ] (DVD)

Unlike British cinema, which never misses another chance to beat itself up about its Colonial past, French cinema has never really dealt directly with the legacy of its own colonial wars: perhaps not so surprising in a nation that never officially recognised it had even been at war in Algeria until 1999 despite losing 27,000 troops there (a drop in the ocean compared to the 300-600,000 Algerian casualties). At times Florent Emilio Siri's Intimate Enemies threatens to turn into a more sophisticated version of The Green Berets, as Benoit Magimel's idealistic young volunteer officer, confronted by FLN atrocities, gradually abandons his ideals for a more morally corrosive pragmatic approach. Sure, some of the French cross the line and torture suspects and shoot suspects `trying to escape,' but for much of the running time it's seen purely from the French side, and they're mostly pretty decent sorts who have their reasons - they even adopt an orphan who survives one massacre. There's also the threat of turning in a French version of Platoon as it sets up a potential conflict with his more experienced sergeant, Albert Dupontel, who takes a more practical approach to torture and killing prisoners. But just when you think it's going to end with a "That's why we're here" speech to the aforementioned orphan, it swings violently away as the nominal hero's values become so eroded that he becomes the worst of all of them and it becomes clear that redemption isn't on the cards.

Aside from writer-director Pierre Schoendoerffer (who gets a thank you in the credits), the French war experience in IndoChine (Vietnam) has been almost completely ignored, while Intimate Enemies is probably the first major film about Algeria since 1966's Lost Command and Battle of Algiers. If it does sound a bit like another loss of innocence saga, it is a fairly accurate reflection of the way the FLN's strategy was designed to make the French escalate their own atrocities to lose the moral high ground they claimed, turning it into a battle between two equally callous sides, only one of whom could claim the right to actually be there. That the characters don't spin off too much into war movie archetypes at the end - the big conflict you're expecting at the beginning never materializes because the old hands know the new arrival will be ground down by the place and don't waste any effort forcing the issue - is possibly down to the co-writing credit the two stars get for their own characters, and if the film is ultimately predictable the unusual setting certainly freshens the old, old story a little. Siri's direction has improved immensely since his unfocused Une Minute de Silence or the never-quite-as-vivid-as-it-should-be Nid de Guepes, showing a good feel for both the desolate hillside landscapes and the smaller character moments and progressing the characters' downward spiral through a series of patrols and botched operations that make it at times feel like a much bigger budget version of Alan Clarke's TV play Contact. It's not an outstanding film, but it's certainly a good one.

While the feature on the French PAL DVD has English subtitles, if you want a good selection of English subtitled extras you're better off seeking the UK PAL 2-disc set.