ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY
*** (A must-see) Directed by Paul Mazursky Written by Roger L. Simon and Mazursky With Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, Margaret Sophie Stein, Alan King, Judith Malina, and Mazursky.
To make matters worse, good adaptations usually compound this problem. As a teenager, I saw the horrific Hollywood versions of The Sound and the Fury and Miss Lonelyhearts shortly before I read the novels, and though ludicrous memories of Yul Brynner’s Jason Compson and Robert Ryan’s Shrike hovered over my initial experiences of those books, the power of Faulkner’s and West’s writing eventually buried them. No such effacement took place, however, when I read Frank Norris’s McTeague after seeing Stroheim’s Greed, or when I encountered Booth Tarkington’s Ambersons after meeting the same family in Welles’s movie: the casting was too sensitive and precise, and both films had a personal urgency that wound up influencing and spilling over into my readings of Norris and Tarkington.
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I’m certainly not trying to imply that Paul Mazursky, the director and coadapter (with Roger L. Simon) of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies, a Love Story, belongs in the same league–or even on the same planet–as Stroheim or Welles. I can’t even say that prior to Enemies (the movie) I’ve been any sort of Mazursky fan at all. At best an entertaining comic writer- director, at worst a vulgar propagandist who promotes the worst habits of the American middle class in the name of middlebrow sociology, he is the sort of filmmaker who winds up mauling his own beloved European models–Truffaut’s Jules and Jim in the cutesy Willie and Phil, Renoir’s Boudu Saved From Drowning in the garish Down and Out in Beverly Hills–by removing their subversive sting in the process of “remaking” them.
At the beginning of the film, after cheerful Jewish folk music plays behind the credits, we hear barking dogs and angry male voices; from the inside of a barn, we see the doors open and soldiers enter with the dogs, the camera quickly gliding past the grisly flayed head of a cow carcass. What turns out to be a nightmare/memory ends with a maid (Margaret Sophie Stein) screaming. The hero, Herman (Ron Silver), wakes up and looks out the window at a ferris wheel; a title informs us that it’s Coney Island in 1949.
Concerning Mazursky’s strengths, the movie has uncommonly good dialogue and nearly all of it derives directly or indirectly from Singer, either through direct quotation or paraphrase. The performances of the leads are more than just good; in the cases of Silver, Huston, and Stein, they’re downright incandescent. If I omit the volatile Olin from this honor roll, this is chiefly because she doesn’t quite bring off a climactic scene involving hysterical screams, but candor compels me to admit that she more than makes up for this lapse elsewhere; her final scene, which concentrates and expands everything we know about her character, is played to perfection. Mazursky’s own single scene is both rich and restrained–a judiciously shaped cameo.)
The consequences of this reticence are fundamental to the film’s beauty and power because they amount to a form of respect for both the real victims of the holocaust and the viewer’s capacity to imagine their experiences. (An ironic form of the same respect is expressed in the first sentence of Singer’s author’s note preceding the novel: “Although I did not have the privilege of going through the Hitler holocaust, I have lived for years in New York with refugees from this ordeal.”)
