Intimate Enemies (2007) offers a French perspective on the Algerian War for Independence. Rather than explore political and imperialist concerns, director Florent Emilio Simi probes the well-worn ground of wartime ethics and morality. It's a good picture, even if it offers few surprises.1959 Algeria. Newly minted Lieutenant Terrien (Benoit Magimel) takes command of a French Army platoon patrolling in the Kabylie region. Terrien butts heads with Sergeant Dougnac (Albert Dupontel), a seasoned noncom whose brutal methods disgust the young Lieutenant. Inevitably, Terrien changes his tune as atrocities accumulate - but slowly loses his sanity.
Intimate Enemies's shave tail versus Sergeant Rock story underpins a century's worth of war pictures and Westerns, and doesn't feel especially fresh here. In fairness, Siri and cowriter Patrick Rotman focus less on Terrien and Dougnac's personal conflict than their reactions to the situation, an approach helped by the episodic story. Unfortunately, this makes them loaded symbols of lost innocence and military cruelty by film's end, undercutting their human development. It ends on a note that's more symbolic than compelling.
Intimate Enemies plays as grim riposte to Jean Larteguy's The Centurions (or Lost Command, its tepid screen adaptation). Terrien's command aren't elite paratroopers but scared conscripts fighting an unwinnable war. Veterans like Dougnac know that wanton cruelty is the only response to an inglorious conflict. Neither side thinks anything of using torture, mutilation or wholesale massacre as legitimate tactics; the FLN slaughter civilians while the French incinerate rebels with napalm and electric probes. Siri avoids Platoon's hand-wringing moral debates; it's not instant breakdown but slow-burning insanity.
The Algerian War remains a controversial topic in France, to say the least, with its after effects lingering today. Enemies dances around an overt statement, instead offering apolitical burnout. Dougnac ultimately remarks that the war wasn't worth fighting - an easy sentiment after the war's already lost. There's a more pointed scene where Terrien, on leave in Paris, is disgusted by a propagandistic newsreel. But Siri mainly downplays imperialist concerns and French politics for combat morality, an issue hardly unique to this dirtiest of conflicts.
Judged purely as a combat picture, Intimate Enemies is top notch. Siri has a flair for visceral action, mixing graphic violence with creative staging. One early battle sees French troops and FLN guerrillas trading machine gun fire through a flock of sheep; another degenerates into friendly fire. With a surfeit of action and shifting locations (arid plains, lush forests, forbidding mountain ranges), Intimate Enemies moves briskly. So briskly indeed, that we almost resent when it stops for character development.
The leads provide no complaints. Benoit Magimel navigates Terrien's newbie-to-nutter arc with commendable subtlety. Albert Dupontel (A Very Long Enagement) gets the trickier role. Dougnard initially seems a stock grizzled veteran, but Dupontel shows him dancing around the lip of insanity himself. Unfortunately, their platoon mates are underwritten (and largely unnamed), without even simple character traits to earn our respect. Mohamed Fellag provides the one exception, as a veteran Algerian with no compunctions fighting his countrymen.
Intimate Enemies won't replace The Battle of Algiers as the definitive look at this conflict. Still, its compelling moral dramas and excellent action scenes should please genre fans.
