Intimate Enemies (2007)

Intimate Enemies (2007)

Release Date: 2 October 2009 (USA)
Quality: DVDRip.XviD-DEViSE
Language: French | Arabic | Kabyle
Runtime: 111 min
Director: Florent Emilio Siri
Company: Les Films du Kiosque, France 2 Cinéma, SND
Movie Info: IMDb
Cast: Benoît Magimel, Albert Dupontel, Aurélien Recoing, Marc Barbé, Eric Savin, Mohamed Fellag, Lounès Tazairt
Genre: Drama | History | War
Watch: Trailer
Size: 700MB

Plot: Algeria's Kabylia region, 1959, and a small, heavily camouflaged outfit of French commandoes is being guided along a rocky hilltop by local Arab Rachid (Metalsi), when they spot some furtive movement in the bushes below and begin a fierce gun battle with the men in the shadows. Soon it is established that both conflicting parties in fact belong to the same side - but not before their leader, Lieutenant Constantin (Hlimi), has been killed by gunfire of the 'friendly' variety.

It is an apt opening to Florent Emilio Siri's Intimate Enemies, a film where friend will repeatedly prove difficult to distinguish from foe and where seemingly every military engagement takes as horrific a toll on the victors as on the defeated.

In the vicious fight against a local group of fellagha insurgents, Constantin's replacement is Terrien (Magimel), an idealistic volunteer who is quick to condemn the extreme interrogation techniques and extra-judicial executions regularly practised by his more battle-hardened colleagues like Sergeant Dougnac (Dupontel) or intelligence officer-cum-torturer Berthaut (Barbé).

The latter dismisses Terrien's moral qualms with the promise: "You'll come round - like we all have." And the next few months of brutal guerilla warfare will prove Berthaut right, as Terrien is gradually transformed from fresh-faced humanist and family man to ruthless killer. Not that the film in any way justifies or condones the murderous conduct of its characters; on the contrary, it dramatises the brutalising effects of war's realities on even the most ethically minded of participants, who, if they survive, must live forever after with the hideous physical and mental scars of their experiences.
Despite claiming victims in the hundreds of thousands, the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence has until recently remained something of a dirty little secret in the land of the colonial occupiers. Around the time of the conflict, French film censors reacted swiftly to even a hint that atrocities were committed by the nation's military, shelving Jean-Luc Godard's oblique Le Petit Soldat (1960) for three years and banning outright Gillo Pontecorvo's even-handed Italian/Algerian co-production The Battle Of Algiers (1966).

It was not until the 1970s that French cinema would begin to address the colonial war directly, with Claude Berri's Le Pistonné (1970), René Vautier's Avoir 20 Ans Dans Aurès (1972) and Yves Boisset's R.A.S. (1973) coming out in rapid succession (although notably only Vautier's film alluded to French acts of barbarity).

In 1999, for the first time France officially acknowledged that it had actually been engaged in a war (as opposed to a mere "public order operation") in Algeria, opening the gateway to a frank re-examination of the decolonisation process - and Intimate Enemies represents the first French feature film about the conflict to have emerged in this new period of openness.
"You can't fight barbarism with barbarism," asserts Terrien, and yet every outrage perpetrated by the fellaghas - sneak attacks, torture, murder and the collective punishment of villagers - will find its match in the actions of the French, with the local civilians or those Arabs who work alongside the colonial forces having their loyalties repeatedly tested. (film4.com)