Florent Emilio Siri – L’ennemi intime AKA Intimate Enemies (2007)

Review from The New York Times, published October 2, 2009
Mike Hale wrote:
“Intimate Enemies” is a movie you’ve seen before, when it was set on the Apache reservation or in the Vietnamese jungle. This time the naïve lieutenant, the jaded sergeant, the suicidal mission with no purpose — all the components of the restless-natives combat movie — are applied to the war in Algeria in the late 1950s.

Florent Emilio Siri, an action specialist whose previous credits include the Bruce Willis vehicle “Hostage” and a Tom Clancy video game, knows how to stage and frame a battle, and for about an hour “Intimate Enemies” is taut and satisfying. A new officer, Terrien (Benoît Magimel), takes over a French and Algerian platoon posted near the “forbidden zone.” Patrols are sent out and ambushed, villages are torched, and rebel prisoners are tortured. The Algerian soldiers (who could be the troops from Rachid Bouchareb’s 2006 World War II film “Indigènes,” 15 years older) agonize over their loyalties. The random death and drunken camaraderie are beautifully photographed, in the Moroccan mountains, by Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci.

The movie goes flat, though, when Mr. Siri and his co-writer, Patrick Rotman, shift their attention from the action to the moral math of guerrilla warfare. While they don’t take sides, they can’t resist turning the increasingly unhinged Terrien and his sergeant, Dougnac (Albert Dupontel), into metaphors, which turns the movie into something all too familiar.

INTIMATE ENEMIES

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Co-written and directed by Florent Emilio Siri; written by Patrick Rotman; director of photography, Giovanni Fiore Coltellacci; edited by Olivier Gajan and Christophe Danilo; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, William Abello; produced by François Kraus and Denis Pineau-Valencienne; released by Outsider Pictures. At the Village East, Second Avenue, at 12th Street, East Village. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Benoît Magimel (Terrien), Albert Dupontel (Dougnac), Aurélien Recoing (Vesoul), Marc Barbé (Berthaut), Eric Savin (Sergeant Tortionnaire), Fellag (the Prisoner), Vincent Rottiers (Lefranc), Lounès Tazaïrt (Said) and Abdelhafid Metalsi (Rachid).

Filename: L.ennemi.intime.2007.720p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.mkv

Size: 4466,41 MiB, 1h 50mn
Source: Blu-ray
Aspect Ratio: 1280x548 SAR, 2.35:1 DAR, 1:1 PAR
Video: H.264, 24 fps, 0.265 bpp, 4 453 Kbps avg
Audio: French, FLAC, 48.0 KHz, 6 channels, 1 105 Kbps avg
Subtitles: English (muxed srt, on by default)

Ripping: AnyDVD HD 6.6.0.9
Demuxing: tsMuxeR 1.10.6
Transcoding: eac3to 3.18
Scripting: AvsP 2.0.2 / AviSynth 2.58
Encoding: x264 core:92 r1510 33d382a
Settings: CRF 17.1, Placebo
Muxing: mkvmerge 3.2.0

https://nitro.download/view/A5E3D9647E330F3/L.ennemi.intime.2007.720p.BluRay.FLAC.x264.mkv

Language(s):French, Arabic, Kabyle
Subtitles:English (muxed srt)