De vijanden

Summary

The first film directed by the poet and novelist Hugo Claus, De vijanden was also the first Belgo-Dutch co-production since 1925.

Claus already had a number of film scripts to his name, including Dorp aan de rivier and Het mes, both directed by Fons Rademakers. Rademakers was also to take on one of the major roles in De vijanden, an anti-war film denouncing the absurdity of branding a whole people as an enemy. Here, the 'enemies' are an American GI who has been separated from his unit, a 19-year-old Belgian man who wants to avenge the death of his grandmother and a middle-aged German soldier taken prisoner by the two men. Amidst the chaos of the Von Rundstedt offensive, the trio wander through the snow-covered Ardennes, fleeing the enemy, yet despite their mutual mistrust never quite able to believe that they are themselves each other's enemy.

Despite the small budget of 4 million francs, with Belgian tanks also playing the parts of their American allies and German adversaries and an endless wait for snow to fall in the Ardennes, Claus' film was more than weIl received. The jubilant critics lauded it simultaneously as a superb B-movie, a film d'auteur and, at the most radical, the most commercial Flemish film since Whitey. Thanks in particular to the outstanding camerawork by Herman Wuyts, the film awakens precisely the sense of anguish and oppression which devours its protagonists. Yet its strongest point is the very atypical characters: the American is a leader who doubts the reasons behind his actions, the German is an older, essentially jovial man and only the Belgian is a real fanatic.