Intimate Enemies

War films walk a tightrope of authenticity - many can be construed as being contrived or misrepresentation of the event itself, because, while there is solid blueprint, there is also an infinite ambiguity, a potential to portray what is often man’s lowest ebb in any number of guises.

So often the positive aspects of warfare are portrayed: the valour, camaraderie, courage and heroism, and although these are often considered good films, and where one war film is often a more elaborate cliché of the other, Intimate Enemies deals with a strong political ideology that resonates with the current political climate.

Florent Emilio Siri’s Intimate Enemies paints a grim, gritty and consistently brutal image of the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence, when over 2,000,000 French soldiers battled the Algerian National Liberation Front. It pulls no punches in its portrayal and while the battle scenes are punishing, the torture scenes of potential fellaghas are aggressive and harrowing. Both suggestive and graphic in its violence, it couples the personal impact of the conflict on the soldiers, and incorporates a highly charged cultural and religious tension.

Lieutenant Terrien (Benoit Magimel) is tasked with commanding a platoon fighting in Algeria’s remote mountain region. His attempts to instil a humanistic element in his men’s warfare are well intentioned, but often ill informed and misguided. The likeable, battle hardened Sergeant Dougnac (Albert Dupontel) doesn’t welcome such an approach but is professional enough to take orders, and bold enough to take the opportunities to highlight his superior’s naivety.

Each man finds his own way of justifying his role in the conflict. Many use the ‘fellaghas’, barbaric blood lust and merciless contempt for human life as a motivation, others are merely fighting their own inner demons. It’s a bleak, unforgiving representation with little humanity and no elaborate examples of camaraderie. Respect is born of desperation, of the mutual acceptance that survival shall be worn like a medal of honour. The platoon stumble upon the decimation of entire villages, and Siri is quick to emphasize how little the French relate with their enemies tyranny. A traitorous threat hangs heavy over the platoon, with many former fellaghas and Algerians within its ranks, adding a palpable tension.

Having witnessed so little esteem for humanity, Terrien and the French soon degenerate to the very barbarism the freedom fighters employ, slaughtering an entire village under machine gunfire. It denotes hypocrisy and how the moral values of warfare can soon become warped or ignored – where they once denounced the fellaghas tactics, they now advocate them.

In the midst of such atrocity, it becomes increasingly hard to rescue any sense of positivity, indeed there is a purveying sense of hopelessness. Sentimentality is kept to a bare minimum throughout the film with relaxed conversation between soldiers strictly limited, but there is a touching scene where Lacroix, a soldier with panache for a camera, who was previously killed, has his film developed and played to the rest of the platoon by a friend for Christmas.

The men’s spirits are fleetingly lifted - Lacroix’s film showing the soldiers happily revelling – but as the fallen friends begin to roll across the projection, the Christmas day celebration soon returns to sadness, the film culminating at the point where Lacroix inadvertently filmed himself dying.

There’s a wonderful sense of warped ideology too, with many of the rebels having fought as brave allies to the French in the 1944 Battle of Monte Cassino, while the Algerians currently fighting for the French question their own muddled identity. Messages of futility, hypocrisy, irony and ill compromise are all present and superbly delivered with agonising poignancy.

Released on 9th June 2008 by Contender Films.

Written by Reef Younis.