It is interesting to compare Jean-Jacques Annaud’s new movie, Enemy at the Gates, with Pearl Harbor, that other recent World War II epic. Pearl Harbor, of course, deals with the surprise Japanese attack on the American fleet that propelled the United States into the war; Enemy at the Gates is set during the long and very arduous battle of Stalingrad, a battle that was the beginning of the end for the German juggernaut.
War movies, as pieces of history fictionalised to a greater or lesser degree, are almost always built around heroes and acts of heroism. For an American movie such as Pearl Harbor (or the submarine drama U-571, which gave the Americans a more heroic role in that area than history did), the need to find heroes seems both an act of ideological triumphalism and a function of a particular kind of narrative. Such film narratives make individuals emblematic of historical events; they leave us with the impression that the destiny of nations relies on the derring-do of a John Wayne, a Kirk Douglas, a Matthew McConnaughey or a Ben Affleck.
Enemy at the Gates is interesting because it not only resists such crude schematics but also actively questions the way individuals become elevated to heroic status. Vassili Zaitsev (Jude Law) is a farmboy become footsoldier; his sharpshooting skills attract the attention of a political commissar, Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), and the Russian propaganda machine goes into overdrive to turn Zaitsev into a national hero.
Such a hero is needed at this dire stage of the siege because, as Danilov points out to his commander, Nikita Kruschev (Bob Hoskins), morale is terribly low: the defending Russian troops are caught between German bullets and those of their own officers, who shoot them if they retreat. After all, this is not just any city — this is Stalingrad, named after the supreme leader himself, and it would be an unforgiveable blow to his ego were it to fall. They don’t quite put it like that, but the point is clear.
The film exposes the mechanics of hero-creation, but it is also caught in an ambiguity of its own — Zaitsev was a real figure, but it is hard to find the real facts about him at this distance in time, and through the mists of the very propaganda that made him a hero. So are Annaud and his scriptwriter Alain Godard fictionalising a real hero or adding to a fiction? In the film, the gap between Zaitsev’s reality and the propaganda war puts some strain on him and his relationship with Danilov, a strain compounded by the fact that a love triangle has developed between the two of them and Tania (Rachel Weisz), a woman soldier.
The love aspect brings personal passions into play in the theatre of war, and again the comparison with Pearl Harbor is instructive. In the American film, the heavy breathing between Affleck, Kate Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett was so engorged by romantic and melodramatic cliché that it threatend to upstage the war itself. In Enemy at the Gates, the love story is treated more circumspectly, and thus has more real poignance. When Zaitsev and Tania have sex, it is the hurried meeting of two dirty, clothed bodies in a bunker, squashed between the supine bodies of sleeping others — and it is convincing and moving.
Yet the love triangle does, somehow, throw the movie off balance, and one is not quite sure why. It is hard to see how else it could have been done, and it does bring some light into an otherwise rather gloomy film. Perhaps the problem is Weisz herself; I, for one, could not really take her seriously in this role. Maybe she just looks too healthy for a half-starved denizen of wartime Stalingrad, for all the dirt smudges and wisps of uncontrolled hair. Or maybe what disturbs her credibility are the associations one has with the ghoul-fighting archaeologist she played in the recent Mummy movies. You half expect her to crack a joke before whipping out some mystic weapon and dispatching a servant of Anubis.
Enemy at the Gates also cannot resist individualising the enemy in the form of a crack German sniper sent out to deal with Zaitsev (a German sniper who, in fact, may have been an invention of Russian propagandists). The story becomes the tale of a duel between these two men, and the German army seems reduced to one foppish sharpshooter and a few assistants. Again, it is hard to see how it could have been done otherwise — this must be a problem with war movies. The enemy is reduced to either one emblematic bad guy or a heap of faceless and dispensible cannon fodder. Ed Harris, as the sniper Konig, all but steals the movie, and he barely says a word for scenes at a time.
The depiction of the siege is a masterpiece of cinematic versimilitude, all grey mud and shattered buildings, highlighted now and again by a red flag — or a splash of blood. Scenes such as the early one in which reinforcements arrive at Stalingrad, under fire from German planes, are quite terrifying, and the sense of desperation throughout is palpable. For that alone, the movie is worth seeing — that and the fact that it contains no American heroes riding to the rescue.