Enemies, A Love Story

Paul Mazursky's best film but then he was working with great material, in this case Issac Bashevis Singer's novel about a Holocaust survivor who, having moved to America after the war, finds himself with three living wives; he's a bigamist more by design than choice, believing his first wife died in the concentration camps, he remarried in America, (now wife number three is a whole different story).

This is a great tragi-comedy; the situation is farcial and sometimes very funny but the horror of the Holocaust permeates every frame and Mazursky treats the material with the respect it is due. This is a movie that comes close to perfection from the superb period design down to the faultless performances of the entire cast.

Ron Silver is superb as Herman, a man confident enough to try to balance three relationships at once, convincing himself he loves all the women in his life, Angleica Huston, the wife who returns from the dead, Margaret Sophie Stein as the simple servant girl he marries after the war and Lena Olin as the clinging beauty who emotionally blackmails him into marriage. Herman is a liar and a cheat and a shyster but Silver makes him hugely sympathetic, an amoral man who, nevertheless, wants to do right by everyone but who is constantly doomed to failure. This is a great movie that deserves to be better known.

a hellish tale about a modern jobe from Bashevis Zinger's Novel. Herman Broder(Ron Silver), a holocaust surviver, lives in the 1940's New York with the polish peasant that hid hom during the war, has an affair with Mash (Lena Olin) , a half crazed camps survivor and has to deal with his first wife, supposedly dead, Tamara (Anjeliqua Huston). All of this is brought in a suffocated, sarcastic, sweaty manner, that you feel his suffering. An excellent performance by all of the above in a movie in a very impressive film

Very little in the previous career of director Paul Mazursky gave any hint of the depth and complexity of this comedy drama, adapted from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story about the misadventures of a Jewish refugee (Ron Silver) in New York City shortly after World War Two. Silver has a few problems most men wouldn't mind sharing, including a wife who is more a devoted servant and a mistress as passionate as she is temperamental, but the cozy arrangement is complicated by the unexpected return of his first wife, long thought dead, to act as a ghostly conscience and councilor for her bewildered husband. The film is so well made, with such attention to period flavor and detail, that it seems mean to point out its few nagging shortcomings: the haphazard structure, with too many sudden, incompatible changes in mood, and the equally inconsistent characters (it's never made clear, for example, why all three women are so devoted to this particular nobody). Too bad some of the effort that went into the production didn't first go into the script, but it's still an unusually rich experience, with an added dimension of depth from the specters of the Holocaust still haunting each character.

After reading the novel this film was based on, I thought: "No way! There is absolutely no way they can portray these raw emotions on film!" But that's exactly what the amazing actors do! The three women are as different as they could be, but each character is spot-on. Between these 3 women (Lena Olin, Anjelica Houston and Margaret Sophie Stein) is Ron Silver, whose character's emotions are clearly displayed on his face - I don't know if he is the anchor in the movie, because at times he is overshadowed by his female co-stars, but he makes me sympathize with him.

The "old" feel of the movie is great, and I do believe that it's a realistic image of New York in the late '40s.

It might be a bit depressing, but it should be seen if not only for the acting - trust me, it's fantastic!

I once read about how Paul Mazursky's career as a director has gravitated between very well done ("Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice", "Moscow on the Hudson") and what-was-he-thinking?! ("Scenes from a Mall", "The Flying Pickle"). Well, I can say with certainty that "Enemies: A Love Story" is one of his good ones. Portraying Holocaust survivor Herman Broder (Ron Silver) living in New York in 1949 and suddenly surrounded by three women (his current wife, another married woman, and his first wife whom he believed to be dead), the movie presents an eye-opening situation. It's like a slice-of-life story taken one step further. As the three women, Margaret Sophie Stein, Lena Olin, and Anjelica Huston do a very good job. Definitely worth seeing.