Director Breaks French Taboo With Film Tackling Algerian War

While Hollywood produced dozens of Vietnam war epics and is now tackling Iraq, the French film industry has shied away from making gun-toting action movies about its own recent war history.

But one French director is attempting to redress the balance, giving the action-film treatment to the bloody saga of Algeria's war of independence against France between 1954 and 1962.

L'Ennemi Intime (Intimate Enemies), which opened in Paris last night, is being touted as a French Platoon, after Oliver Stone's war epic: a special-effects extravaganza that tackles the psychological horrors of the men fighting for the French colonial side.

It depicts napalm raids and French torture methods as well as the terror campaign of Algeria's National Liberation Front, the FLN. Scripted by a historian and based on hundreds of accounts from soldiers, its makers claim it marks a new era of France facing up to its past.

World interest in the Algeria conflict grew after the US president, George Bush, revealed he was reading an account by the British historian Alastair Horne to learn lessons for Iraq.

But in France the war remains an uncomfortable topic. Last week the prime minister, François Fillon, announced the creation of a "foundation for the memory of the war of Algeria" after a ceremony paying tribute to France's "harkis", Algerians who broke with their countrymen to fight for France, only to face terrible discrimination when they arrived in France after the war.

L'Ennemi Intime proudly proclaims it is the first genuine Hollywood-style action film on the Algeria conflict. Only a handful of acclaimed films have tackled the conflict, notably Gillo Pontecorvo's acclaimed The Battle of Algiers, which did not appear until 1966 and was banned for years in France, in part because of its graphic torture scenes.

But L'Ennemi Intime's director, Florent Emilio Siri - who has worked in Hollywood and directed Bruce Willis in the action movie Hostage, has found his American-style approach raising hackles among some critics.

Most critics, including Le Monde's, praised him for tackling the failures of a war "that still hasn't found peace in the collective conscience". But some warned of cliches, Libération cautioning against trying to ape the "metaphysical psychedelia" of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.

Yet French commentators were united on the need for films exploring what was once a taboo conflict. Patrick Rotman, the writer and historian who scripted the film from research with soldiers, said France had "moved out of a time when passions ran strong and into a time where it's possible to look at history. This film wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago."