Dangerous Game.(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.