Enemies, a Love Story. - movie reviews

National Review, Feb 19, 1990 by John Simon

Minority Reports

ENEMIES: A Love Story strives relentlessly, as befits a movie based on a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer, to combine sex with metaphysics. I haven't read the book -- Singer is not my cup of chicken soup -- but the first three-fifths of the film work well enough. This is the tale of Herman Broker, a maried Polish Jew whom his Christian servant kept hidden from the Nazis in a hayloft. When his wife, Tamara, and two children were lost in the Holocaust, Herman married Yadwiga, the servant, and they emigrated to America.

They live in Brooklyn, in the symbolic shadow of Coney Island's giant Wonder Wheel, where the peasant Yadwiga humbly keeps house and does not question Herman's long absences as a traveling book salesman. Actually, Herman works as ghostwriter for a fancy Central Park West rabbi, and shares another apartment with Masha, his sexy mistress, a survivor of the camps, and her even more histrionic, indeed hysterical, mother. His traveling is done on the subway: from Yadwiga's to Rabbi Lembeck's to Masha's. When the supposedly dead Tamara shows up (the children perished, but she miraculously escaped) Herman's life becomes as restlessly spinning as a roulette, if not a wonder, wheel.

Meanwhile, Masha, pregnant, has extorted marriage from Herman, whose life as a trigamist has, like any ferris wheel, its ups and downs. He gets creature comforts from Yadwiga, who even converted to Judaism for him, and ends up being the best Jew of the lot; from Masha, he gets mad passion and infighting (all is war in love and sex); with Tamara, there is the shared past as well as wry, practical sobriety. But the human Wonder Wheel breaks down in a funny party scene.

At this point, regrettably, the film also crumbles. It may be that, in the novel, Singer can make the bizarre and violent fluctuations of Masha's behavior, which drag Herman partially along, believable; in Roger L. Simon and Paul Mazursky's screenplay, they are a capricious mixture of the willful and woeful, more arbitrary than fateful. Perhaps part of the problem is that, despite canny casting, a certain imbalance obtains. the simply competent and earthy Yadwiga of Margaret Sophie Stein and the cynically brooding Tamara of Anjelica Huston cannot quite compete--perhaps nobody could--with Lena Olin's dazzlingly sensual Masha. Inasmuch as Herman's intellectual complexities are left underdeveloped by the script and the in other respects impeccable Ron Silver, it is not clear why the movie's Herman, sexually greedy and slightly pathetic, would not settle down to amorous enmity with this mother of his unborn child.

Toward film's end, all the characters make choices that, at least as the movie presents them, are hard to swallow. But until then, Mazursky's good handling of the actors (with the exception, perhaps, of two grotesques who verge on caricature as played by Phil Leeds and Judith Malina), and his feeling for the seedier aspects of New York in the late Forties, supplemented by Pato guzman's expert production design, serve Enemies well. And Lena Olin is unforgettable as carnality incarnate.