Enemies, a Love Story (Paul Mazursky, 1989)

 

Paul Mazursky’s filming of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, A Love Story is a flavourful, intelligent pleasure, its well-balanced complexities placing it almost incalculably above most of the director’s coarse later work. In likely his best screen role, Ron Silver plays Herman, living in Coney Island in 1949, married to Yadwiga, the Gentile former servant who helped save his life during the war, while having an affair with Masha, a camp survivor separated from her husband, and then suddenly learning that Tamara, the wife everyone assumed was dead, is alive and also in New York: the situation is inherently comic and sometimes played as such, but it’s a comedy based in the Holocaust’s terrible, multi-faceted, ongoing proximity. It’s tangibly present, in the tattoos on several forearms, as visible and unremarked on as vaccination scars, in thoughts and conversations and speculations; when Herman sees Tamara after so many years, the magnitude of the secular miracle overwhelms his ability to welcome it as such, gratitude or joy overwhelmed by logistical panic. The film balances between a sense that almost all things might properly be allowable in the wake of such suffering, and the practical fact of laws and ethics and the human propensity to judge and envy and gossip remaining unchanged; Herman initially seems exultant at what he’s getting away with, the stress of keeping the balls in the air all part of the transgressive thrill, but by the end he’s hemmed in to the point almost of total erasure. The subtle ending suggests the possibility of new structures and allegiances though, with two of the women bringing up the absent Herman’s daughter together, while also indicating the persistence of old hierarchies (although the child is Yadwiga’s, she retains her old subservience to her former employer Tamara, almost seeming like a maid engaged to assist the real mother).