Intimate Enemies

A movie you've seen before, when it was set on the Apache reservation or in the Vietnamese jungle.

Along the way, Siri exposes French hypocrisy -- showing that the Algerian rebels were only doing what the French Resistance did in battling the Nazis who ruled their country in WorldWar II.

With its sententious air of historical reckoning, Enemies is an impressive monument, but not a moving one.

The war they tried to ignore! L'ennemi intime (Intimate Enemies) is a raw picture looking at French conscripts during the Algeria War. It was a war that was fought for 8 years between 1954-1962, it was also a war that France failed to even acknowledged had existed until over three decades later. Pic picks up the thread in 1959 and the focal point is the relationship between Lieutenant Terrien (Benoît Magimel) and Sergent Dougnac (Albert Dupontel). The former is the new guy, idealistic, while the latter is the grizzled and battled scarred veteran. The Barbarian Hordes. With the French locked in battle against the Algerian rebels, the film runs the protagonists through the psychological mangler. The horrors of war are born out, with both sides of the conflict depicted with a barbarity that's harrowing in nature. As the pic progresses you can see Terrien being worn down by what he observes, the key being he is losing his idealistic heart. Moral dilemmas are deftly inserted into the screenplay, but disappointingly the political thrum that was driving the conflict is given short shrift. From an action stand point director and co-writer Florent-Emilio Siri strikes hard, with two particular sequences - one a field of fleeing soldiers and the finale involving air-strikes - outstanding in construction. Siri also knows when to tighten the emotional noose, bringing to us poignant scen…