The intelligence Officer, a former resistant who has been tortured by the nazies and who know tortures Algerian, is indeed an interesting character.
You could see by the end that although he survived his torture at the hands of the Gestapo, Berthaut never got over torture and he believed torture or be tortured. He visited on others what had been done to him. His character was the more complex than Terrien who really represents loss of humanity and ideals as a general rather than a particular person. The sad thing about Terrien is he was right. He knew that to win, really win and not just defeat, you had to win over the people and negotiate.
But I'll stick with my point of view about atrocities. There is no doubt the film is accurate when showing both sides commited crimes, but cinematographicaly it's not very well shown. You could tell before seeing them when those scenes were going to happen and how they would end.
It's a film and as well as histoicaly accurate, it has to have artistic qualities. And on the crime/atrocities, in my opinion, the film just lined up a lot of clichés. Those scenes weren't particuraly powerfull, it just seemed the director or the writer felt he had to put them in in order to be fair with each side.
I wasn't always certain what the outcome would be, but it is possible that some of the themes of this film are now so prevalent that originality is difficult.
In L'Ennemi Intime, there's nothing as strong as the village scene in Platoon for exemple.
Surely that's because such a scene would have swayed the audience's feelings against the French soldiers and the whole point in this film was to show that neither side was better and the situation for the ordinary folk just awful, as it was in Vietnam. I'm glad the film avoided this sentimental horror. Besides the slaughter of the villagers at Taida was bad enough as was the mutilation and murder of the captain taking the dead wan wounded man back to base. Better to leave what happened to the imagination rather than show it in grisly detail, which is more respectful to those who died. Let's not objectify their deaths anymore than they were.
I'm a fountain of blood
In the shape of a girl
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