91Èȱ¬

It's 1959, at the height of the Algerian rebellion against French rule. Idealistic Lieutenant Terrien (Benoit Magimel) is sent to lead a French battalion on a mission to take out an elusive rebel leader. Appalled by French torture techniques, Terrien clashes with his war-hardened sergeant, Dougnac (Albert Dupontel), who assures him that his idealism won't last once he's witnessed the horrors perpetrated by the enemy. Hardly the most original premise for a war film, but director Florent Siri's take on the plight of the Algerians throws up a withering parallel that raises it above the ordinary.

This aspect of the film is played out not so much by its leads, but by its supporting cast of Algerian characters. Some fight for the occupying French, others for a free Algeria, and the cowed population is caught in between. Shades of Vichy, anyone? Were the occupying French in fact no better than the Nazis who ruled France during WWII, forcing people to kill their own countrymen? Siri's film scratches two French war wounds at the same time, to draw fresh and bitter blood.

"POWERFUL AND WELL ACTED"

These wounds are most excruciatingly re-opened by the scene in which a rebel, about to be executed by a pro-French Algerian soldier, tremblingly displays a war medal he earned when fighting for France against the Nazis: he's really only doing what the French Resistance were doing in the 1940s. The implication is not lost on Dougnac, whose view of the war changes, ending in a - quite literally - shocking sequence that I will not give away but which symbolises Gallic guilt over Algeria perfectly. Terrien's journey is more conventional, but still powerful and well acted, and whether or not his team captures the chief insurgent becomes incidental to the film's overriding mission: to symbolise the hypocrisy of former French foreign policy in a series of self-contained and powerful vignettes.

Intimate Enemies is out in the UK on 25th January 2008.