The Enemy

Written from jail by Yilmaz Güney, as was The Herd, this is a gritty, atmospheric story of the struggle for survival in Third World urban poverty, and its impact on a marriage. Overlaid with symbolism, some of which is inevitably lost in the culture gap (the dog poisoning, one gathers, is specially meaningful to Turks), its style is at once compelling and disturbing. Regrettably, in the interests of low Western attention spans, some 20 minutes have been cut, and the loss of one arguably crucial scene reduces the ending to a deus-ex-machina resolution rather than the narrative progression of the original.