ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1990 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: A very substantial film with strong
elements of both comedy and drama. A film with a strong
period feel and a story worth telling and told on an adult
level. Rating: +2.
The Holocaust is over and Herman Broder survived. Now he is haunted only by nightmares of the night the Nazis took his wife, Tamara, and children. All three had been killed in the death camps, he'd been told. Now Broder is married to Yadwiga, the Polish servant whose family saved his life. Off and on he teaches Yadwiga to be Jewish, though she seems more earnest about it than he is. He has an okay job as a ghost writer for a famous rabbi and he has a good-looking mistress on the side. That's Masha, a fiery Jewish woman who also survived the death camps. For now Broder is getting by, but soon his mistress will be pregnant and wanting to be married, and to make matters worse, Broder's first wife survived after all and this will leave Broder with two wives more than he can handle.
Paul Mazursky's ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY, based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, is a surprisingly well-realized comedy-drama with four characters, one husband and his three wives, all believable and three- dimensional. And the fifth character is the post-war Jewish community in New York, very authentically recreated on the screen--authentic enough that it brought back memories of when I was very young, not long after this film is set.
Broder's three wives are very different types, each with her own strengths. Margaret Sophie Stein plays stolid, sincere, and homely Yadwiga, still half living in the Poland in which she grew up. She knows her husband has some hanky-panky going on, but ignores it while she can, thinking that if she can make herself Jewish enough she can hold on to him. The bewitching Lena Olin (of THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING) plays Masha, burning out her life as quickly as she can. Then there is Anjelica Huston as Tamara, at first bitterly bent on reclaiming her husband but eventually transforming herself into a healing force. And at the center of these women is Herman himself (played by Ron Silver), confused and indecisive, with a need to feel he is in control of things, most of which are beyond him.
There is a lot of film here. For a film with both comedy and drama, there is surprisingly much of each. The comedy does not feel at all forced and is all very human. The drama is also very human and at times very painful. Maurice Jarre understood the film very well and provided a score with light klezmer music to underscore the comedy and with sad clarinet music to underscore the more serious moments. ENEMIES is one of the better films of 1989, a year that had more than its share of good films. I rate it a high +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. For those who worry about such things, there is explicit sex and indistinct dialogue. I didn't mind the former, but lamented the latter.
Mark R. Leeper
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