A War Epic With a Big Difference

The gore and grit of World War II’s most pivotal battle splatters the screen throughout “Enemy at the Gates,” a film about the siege of Stalingrad as replete with brutality, betrayal and war’s senseless waste of humanity as any of the genre.

But in a radical departure from tradition, French director Jean-Jacques Annaud has delivered an epic war story for the 51st annual Berlinale film festival in which there are no battlefield villains.

Forced into the deadly grudge match between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, Russian and German forces are cast by Annaud as pawns in the clash of totalitarian titans, a staggering battle that lasted 200 days--from late 1942 into 1943--and killed nearly 2 million.

It is a sympathetic portrayal of Allied and Axis rank-and-file that the film’s creators hope will be received by post-Cold War Russians as long-overdue recognition of their nation’s wartime sacrifice and among Germans as a less polemic presentation of a chapter of history that six decades has made distant.

However, applause was less than thunderous at Wednesday’s world premiere, and Thursday’s reviews by Berlin’s notoriously hypercritical film reviewers cast the German-American production as a failed hybrid of a Hollywood western and a propagandistic Russian war story.

Indeed, the film--titled “Duell” in German--focuses not on the cataclysmic battle for the Volga River city but on the eye-to-eye standoff between two gifted snipers, one based on a real Soviet war hero and the other a product of the scriptwriters’ (Annaud and Alain Godard) artistic license.

Vassily Zaitsev, a Ural Mountains shepherd boy transformed into inspirational model by Soviet propagandists, is played by Jude Law, while Ed Harris portrays Nazi aristocrat Maj. Koenig (the audience never learns his first name) in the film’s most compelling performance.

Unwaveringly confident amid widely murmured doubts that the film will engage American audiences--a point made in a scathing Variety review that ran Thursday--Annaud insists that he expects a box-office success after the film is released in the U.S. on March 16 by Paramount Pictures.

“When I get enthusiastic about a project, when I decide to go ahead with it, I don’t think about audiences. I don’t think about what people will say in [Beijing] or Berlin or Los Angeles,” said the director. “Experience has shown me that if I am interested in something, other people will be too.”

Describing it as “an intimate epic,” the film depicts the symbolic duel between Zaitsev and Koenig against the backdrop of the ruined city, the gateway to the strategic oil fields of southern Russia. The Russian sharpshooter’s political commissar, Danilov, played by Joseph Fiennes, at one point defines the standoff between the fresh-faced Slavic peasant and the silver-haired Prussian nobleman as “the essence of class struggle,” another of the illusions shattered by the time the 131-minute film ends.

Moritz de Hadeln, who is retiring after 22 years of presiding over the festival, said he chose the Mandalay Pictures presentation for the premier event of his last Berlinale because of its historical significance for Europeans and because it serves as “a calling card for Germany’s technical know-how.”

German media have made much of the film’s cost, which De Hadeln cited as $95 million, saying it’s the most expensive production ever in Europe. But the festival director defends the outlay as money well-spent “because it is all on the screen.” About 600 extras were hired from among eastern Germany’s unemployed to portray the expendable infantry grunts thrown into the maw of battle by both sides.

Production Spares No Expense

Filmed exclusively in eastern Germany, the movie engages this country’s considerable production resources in re-creating Stalingrad’s Red Square and Volga River crossings at an abandoned mining complex near the city of Cottbus, close to the Polish border. Computer-assisted imagery projects a convincing backdrop of vast, smoldering ruins to which the city, now called Volgograd, was reduced by the siege.

Emulating the graphic opening scenes of “Saving Private Ryan,” Annaud’s film presents Zaitsev’s arrival at the battlefront in a gory, chaotic panorama of wooden launches ferrying fresh recruits into the slaughter across the Volga. Balancing the brutality of Axis bombers strafing the unarmed Soviet novices are the ruthless political officers, who shout threats of execution for all deserters and blast away at those leaping in terror into the frigid waters.

Bob Hoskins’ portrayal of the battle’s political commissar, Nikita S. Khrushchev, also is notable for its accurate depiction of the crude and ruthless future Soviet leader.

Annaud lauds the Russian emigres of Berlin for bringing authenticity to the production with their personal stories of Stalingrad survival and their language skills, which allowed Russian to be spoken in the background of a film in which the main dialogue is in English.

“A few new jobs for the locals” was about the only good thing said about the film by the influential Berliner Zeitung daily, whose critic denounced Annaud’s project as having “failed miserably.”

Munich’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung complained that the film’s focus on the snipers’ duel trivialized the battle that was Germany’s worst-ever military defeat, a view echoed by Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, which denounced the film as a disaster.

Other reviewers savaged what they saw as Hollywood heavy-handedness in imposing a trite happy ending on a film otherwise credible for its portrayal of the filth and disorder of war. Love scenes between Zaitsev and the beautiful civil-defense volunteer Tanya, played by Rachel Weisz, are seen as a distraction from the film’s immersion of the audience in the horror of battle and the squalor of rubble-strewn shelters.

While German critics found little to praise in “Enemy at the Gates,” which is based on the novel of the same name by U.S. historian William Craig, Mandalay Pictures President Adam Platnick predicts that the film will provide an emotional touchstone for Europeans and a post-Cold War appreciation in the U.S. for Russians’ wartime perseverance.

“As an American, you are taught that the war was won by Americans at Normandy, but the truth of the matter is that the war was won in Russia by Russians,” said Platnick.

It has taken the distance of time and history to allow that truth to be told, he added.

“That Russia’s wartime sacrifice was never recognized by Americans is a product of the Cold War,” said Platnick, himself of Russian descent. “When we were all huddled in bomb shelters in the 1960s waiting for Khrushchev to attack us with nuclear missiles, it was hard to focus on the sacrifices young Russian men and women made to defeat Hitler.”

Annaud’s film opened the 12-day Berlinale with the incumbent fanfare of attendance by Law, Hoskins, Weisz and the European film world glitterati, but it is running outside the festival’s official competition for the Golden Bear to be awarded Feb. 18.

The 23 films vying for the prize--considered Europe’s No. 3 festival after Cannes and Venice--include Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic,” starring Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones (the film opened here to a far more enthusiastic reaction than “Enemy at the Gates” received); Gus Van Sant’s “Finding Forrester,” with Sean Connery; Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled”; and Lasse Hallstrom’s “Chocolat.”