Love during wartime — David and Goliath meets an ironic Peter and the Wolf. Enemy at the Gates is a cinematic storybook of romantic fairy tales set against the grim backdrop of the Nazi siege of Soviet Stalingrad.
Like the Peter of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s symphonic children’s story, Vassily Zaitsev (Jude Law, The Talented Mr. Ripley) was raised by his grandfather on a farm threatened by wolves. Unlike Prokofiev’s gentle Peter, Vassily is taught to shoot by his grandfather. When wolves invade their gates and attack their horses, Vassily fires — and misses. As his grandfather takes down the predators, Vassily tearfully apologizes. He’ll never miss again.
Sept. 20, 1942: Vassily and all remaining able-bodied Soviets are mobilized to defend Stalingrad at all costs. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet) tears a terrible page from Saving Private Ryan’s D-Day invasion sequence and translates it into Russian. Fortified Nazi machine gunners on shore and Nazi fighter planes darkening an already leaden sky spray a lethal hail of bullets onto boatloads of Red Army soldiers. Vassily luckily survives.
Vassily goes into action, a Russian David against the Nazi Goliath, bringing down several German officers against nearly impossible odds. Political Officer Danilov (Joseph Fiennes, Shakespeare in Love) makes a national hero of the young soldier who soon scores more than 50 kills as a sniper. While the two young men both notice their comely comrade Tania, Nazi intelligence discovers Vassily and marks him for death. The Germans bring in master sniper Major Koenig and the duel begins.
But duel isn’t quite the right word. This isn’t High Noon. In the lethal chess match, the game of hide and seek, that Vassily and Koenig play, the Russian is clearly outclassed. But Vassily, like all truly romantic heroes, is pure of heart. And that’s the problem.
Annaud’s lens attempts to romanticize the horrors of war into a drawn-out fairy tale, where the real-life Vassily becomes somewhat of a prince enchanted into Russian peasant’s clothes to slay a Nazi dragon, the enemy at the gates. But as one of the characters, a young boy, tragically discovers, war is not child’s play.
E-mail James Keith La Croix at [email protected].
This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2001.