Dangerous Game. - Review - movie review

The French filmmaker Jean-Jacques Annaud has had a checkered career. His first film, Black and White in Color (1976), about inept colonial warfare between the French and Germans in 1915 West Africa, was an absolute gem. Ranging from drolly farcical to sharply satirical, it was comedy at its brainiest and most biting. His next, Hothead, a comedy about two competing factory soccer teams (and much else), was intelligent, but slightly offside.

After that, Annaud went commercial. Quest for Fire, based on one of J. H. Rosny's once-popular novels about prehistoric tribal wars and caveman romance, benefited from the linguistic contribution of Anthony Burgess, movement-consulting by Desmond Morris, and some nice woolly mammoths. But the film's authenticity was marred by the filmmaker's anachronistic sentimentality. Later, Annaud's version of The Name of the Rose, softened by a preposterous happy ending, misfired.

The Bear, about an orphaned bear cub's coming of age, told from the bear's point of view, had a lot of charm, not least in the sounds of nature substituting for dialogue, but could not escape a soupcon of Disneyism.

The Lover, based on Marguerite Duras's self-serving novel about coming of sexual age in prewar Vietnam, had some wonderfully authentic touches, but the central love story failed to ignite. Seven Years in Tibet was a glossy picture postcard about strange doings in a forbidden city, but emerged as a bit of a Lhasa apso. It also glossed over some queasy political questions.

Now comes Enemy at the Gates, centering on the duel to the death of two master snipers, young Vasily Zaitsev, a historical figure, and the German Major Konig, who may or may not have been. Vasily was a shepherd boy from the Urals, whose grandfather trained him to shoot by hunting wolves; Konig, if he existed, ran a prestigious school for Nazi sharpshooters. In the middle of one of World War II's most crucial battles, the six-month siege of Stalingrad with perhaps as many as 2 million dead, these men are locked in mortal combat, seeing each other only, if at all, through their telescopic rifle sights.

It is a curious love-hate story between Vasily and Konig, simple, barely literate shepherd and gold-tipped-cigarette-smoking aristocrat. Each is admiringly fascinated by the other, studying his minutest quirks, and trying to shoot him dead. Each man does mighty devastation in the enemy lines, and tracks the other through spectacular stratagems across eccentric battlegrounds and from bizarre hiding places. But, until the very end, neither can nail the other.

The inferno of war-burning and smoking Stalingrad in jagged ruins, a German air attack on Russian reinforcements crossing the Volga in boats, and assorted other horrors-is depicted spectacularly in the best Spielbergian fashion. Annaud, however, not content with this epic canvas, insists on adding a gratuitous love triangle involving the relationship between the ingenuous Vasily and Danilov, a brilliant but neurotic officer and propagandist, who turns Vasily into a morale- boosting national hero. Both fall in love with Tanya, a university- educated young Jewish girl who, thanks to her knowledge of German, has a cushy office job, but yearns to go out to fight and avenge her slaughtered Jewish parents. Because Danilov, too, is Jewish, he hopes to win Tanya; she, however, prefers Vasily, with melodramatic consequences.

There are some fairly stereotypical figures: the brave Russian mother, the grizzled soldier who has seen it all, the valiant young Russian boy who shines Konig's boots and pretends to be a German sympathizer, but spies for his beloved Vasily. And there are some worst yet, including Bob Hoskins as a menacing but comic Khrushchev, made more comic by (inadvertently) mispronouncing his own name. More subtly, the unembellished shadow of Stalin hovers over all.

The acting is consistently good, with Joseph Fiennes a nicely unpredictable but ultimately noble Danilov, Rachel Weisz a spunky but tenderhearted Tanya, and Jude Law as a star-quality-notwithstanding believable Vasily. Best of all is Ed Harris's Konig, able to make the film's most complex character entirely believable. Only Gabriel Marshall-Thomson, as the shoeshine boy, is too adorable and, even for the most naive moviegoers, presages a sticky end. Also distracting is the unrelentingly god-awful score (by James Horner, who should be made to stand in a corner for at least a month), plus a lot of rather questionable dialogue by Annaud and Alain Godard. Robert Fraisse's cinematography contributes powerfully to a flawed but by no means unimpressive movie.

--If anyone tells you he could follow Memento, be assured he is a liar. Or worse yet, a Memento cultist, trying to turn a clinker into a classic. The writer-director Christopher Nolan has taken what seems to be a fairly unremarkable film noir, sliced it to ribbons, and more or less arbitrarily scrambled the pieces.

The insurance investigator Leonard Shelby, after seeing his wife raped and murdered, gets a knock on the head and loses his short-term memory. Everything before the blow he remembers clearly, but now he forgets everything that happens to him after 15 minutes or so. I doubt if such a condition actually exists, but that is the least problem here.