L’Ennemi intime (2007) - film review

Algeria, 1959.  Terrien, a young lieutenant in the French army, takes command of a battalion stationed in the Kabyle mountains.  Here, he comes into contact with Sergeant Dougnac, an experienced soldier whose hardened view of conflict is completely at odds with Terrien’s idealism.  France may not officially be at war with Algeria but what these two men experience over the coming months will be an ordeal that will test their endurance to the very limit.  As he sees his young comrades cut down, Terrien awakens to the reality of warfare and soon realises he is turning into a hardened killer...

Considering its long-lasting political impact and the deep scars it left on a generation of French people, it seems extraordinary that, for forty years, the Algerian War has been almost completely overlooked by French cinema.  Just as successive French governments refused to acknowledge the Algerian situation as a war (it wasn’t until 1999 that the term was officially sanctioned), so French filmmakers have shown a similar reticence when it comes to commenting on their country’s traumatic period of decolonisation.   Should we be surprised that the most significant film on the Algerian War, The Battle of Algiers (1966), was made by an Italian, Gillo Pontecorvo?  Those few French film directors who dared to tackle the subject soon found their efforts compromised by those in high places.  Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit soldat (1963) was originally banned by the censors, René Vautier was only granted a distribution visa for Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972) after he went on hunger strike and Yves Boisset was relentlessly opposed by the French military when he made R.A.S. (1973).  The Algerian War was evidently a no-go area for anyone holding a French passport and a clapperboard.  Compare this with the situation in America following the Vietnam War, where filmmakers were lining up to record for posterity their impressions of an ill-judged and badly prosecuted conflict, most notably Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter, 1978), Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now, 1979), Oliver Stone (Platoon, 1986), Stanley Kubrick (Full Metal Jacket, 1987) and John Irvin (Hamburger Hill, 1987).  By contrast, Algeria was the war that the French appeared eager to forget.  

Now, almost half a century on, the Algerian War no longer appears to be a taboo subject.  As France basks in a resurgence of anti-war sentiment in the wake of the West’s latest military escapades in the Middle East (which show some uncomfortable parallels with the Algerian conflict), the current crop of French filmmakers appear to be fixated on the so-called Nameless War.  After Philippe Faucon’s La Trahison (2005) and Laurent Herbiet’s Mon Colonel (2006) comes L’Ennemi intime, a full-bodied action war movie which makes Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1931) look like a brawl in a toddler’s playpen.  This starkly authentic account of battle operations in the mountains of Kabylia is directed with flair, and a whiff of sadistic relish, by Florent Emilio Siri, who had previously distinguished himself with his darkly visceral thrillers Nid de guêpes (2002) and Hostage (2005).  Siri developed the screenplay, his most intelligent to date, with Patrick Rotman, an eminent writer and documentary filmmaker who had previously collaborated with Bertrand Tavernier on his Algerian War piece, La Guerre sans nom (1992).

The most gruellingly realistic war film that has been made in France to date, L’Ennemi intime offers not only an uncompromising visual testimony of the naked horrors of warfare but also its terrible longer term consequences.  The film’s most potent anti-war sentiment emerges from its portrayal of how the experience of war can change a man’s nature, transforming him from a compassionate and rational being into an inhuman savage, murdering without compunction and desensitised to the carnage and the destruction that surrounds him.  Siri employs, to great effect, many of the stylistic devices that Steven Spielberg used on his groundbreaking war film Saving Private Ryan (1998) - de-saturated colour photography, erratic camera motion and rough, faux documentary-style editing - to give the film a dated newsreel look (to set it in its historical context) and to heighten the subjective experience of watching it.  The battle sequences are particularly well realised but are an ordeal to sit through, so vividly do they convey the sheer horror and brutality of modern warfare.  This is a film that unapologetically reminds us what war really is - not a game, but a mindless orgy of destruction, in which flesh is ripped from the bone and young lives are snuffed out in an adrenalin-fuelled whirlwind of fear, pain and incomprehension.   

It is an impressive piece, one that leaves a deep and lasting impression, but the one area where it does fall down is in its characterisation.  So preoccupied is Siri with confronting us with the visual horrors of war that he neglects to show us, in a convincing manner, the impact that the unremitting exposure to death and barbarism is having on his characters.  Benoît Magimel’s gradual transformation from idealistic good guy to battle-hardened guntoter is too unsubtle and demonstrative to have any impact - it is hard to sympathise with a character that is being propelled down such an obvious plot trajectory.  By contrast, Albert Dupontel’s portrayal is far more credible and does show how war can disfigure a man’s personality, stripping away his humanity and making him a slave to his primal instincts.  The later scenes, in which the intense inner trauma of Dupontel’s character comes to the surface, are the most poignant, providing as powerful an anti-war comment as the innumerable scenes of blood-drenched carnage that preceded it.  If all of the characters in this film had been written and played as convincingly as Dupontel’s it could have been one of the greatest of all war films.

Whilst it does occasionally struggle to get beyond the superficial, L’Ennemi intime does ultimately deliver one Hell of a punch.  Without ever appearing gratuitous in its depiction of violence, the film shows us just how destructive a bullet can be, and how unspeakably vicious those on both sides of the conflict can be in pursuit of their aims.  Torture, mutilation, mass execution - no atrocity is spared when one tribe takes up arms against another.  We are also reminded of the terrible irony of the conflict, namely that many of the Algerians who were fighting for independence had only a few years previously fought alongside France and her allies in the Second World War.  The most gruesome sight offered by the film is the sequence in which the French soldiers inspect the charred remains of their opponents’ bodies after a napalm bombing.  This is the true face of war - ugly beyond belief, staring out at us and demanding why human beings cannot resolve their differences in some other way.  Maybe this is why French filmmakers have been so reluctant to tackle the Algerian War.  How could France ever own up to having perpetrated the kind of horrors that we see here, the work of the barbarian at his worst, the most obscene affront to civilisation?  How much easier to close your eyes and pretend it never happened.

© James Travers 2011

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