As I was looking through the various streaming channels and their on-demand services, I came across a new-to-me movie that had a synopsis that sounded interesting to me: Enemies, a Love Story. Because of that interesting synopsis, I decided I'd sit down and watch the movie.
Ron Silver plays Herman Broder. At the beginning of the movie, he's having a nightmare. It's his native Poland during World War II, and Herman and his wife Tamara are Jewish, still hiding out at the house in the country. Sure enough, the Nazis show up and find Tamara, taking her away to a concentration camp to be killed. Herman wakes up from the nightmare, and it's 1949 in Coney Island, where Herman now lives, having survived the war.
Fortunately for him, he has a good wife in the form of Jadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), who was a non-Jewish servant at the Broder place which is why she was able to stay on during the war and help hide the Broders. They both left for America after the war and got married. Jadwiga does the housewife thing while Herman does research and ghost writing for Rabbi Lembeck (Alan King).
It's not the happiest of marriages, however, as Herman is having an affair with Masha (Lena Olin). Masha, for her part, is also married (her husband is played by the movie's director, Paul Mazursky, in a brief cameo), and somewhat more up front about claiming it's an unhappy marriage. She keeps pressing Herman to get a divorce from Jadwiga so he can marry Masha, but he dithers about what to do.
If that's not bad enough, things are about to get a whole lot more complicated for Herman. He discovers there's a personal ad for him in the paper, suggesting that he go to a certain address. He does go, and what does he find? Tamara (Anjelica Huston) has survived the concentration camp! She learned that Herman became a refugee like all those other Jews and went to New York, so she's followed him for the fairly unsurprising reason that most people's conception of God would insist that the two are still morally married even if a court could have declared Tamara legally dead.
At least Tamara might be able to accept that Herman had logical reason to believe that she had in fact died, and that it would be logical for him to find a new wife -- and you can understand that people like Herman and Jadwiga might fall in love out of a shared emotional bond that grew from having to work together to survive the Nazis. So Tamara is somewhat willing to entertain the idea that she's not going to be Herman's de facto wife any longer.
That's about the only piece of good news for Herman, who hears from Jadwiga that she's pregnant, and learns from Masha that she too is pregnant. Two wives, and a mistress, and two children on the way, with one of them illegitimate? What's a man to do?
Enemies, a Love Story is based on a novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer; as I said at the beginning, the movie has a really interesting premise. Unfortunately, I couldn't help but feel like the movie has trouble finding the proper tone. A movie like My Favorite Wife, or, I suppose, Too Many Husbands can easily deal with the material as a farce. Here, however, that sort of farcical idea is sitting on top of characters who survived the Holocaust, something that seems rather less ripe for humor, this being several years before Life is Beautiful and not having a prominent juvenile character. I haven't read the book, so I wouldn't be surprised if Singer was able to come up with the right tone in print.
Still, a lot of other reviewers have heaped high praise on Enemies, a Love Story, while the Academy recognized the quality of the acting by nominating both Huston and Olin for Supporting Actress Oscars. So I wouldn't be surprised if other people watch this movie and like it a lot where I have more of a lukewarm opinion of the movie.
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