MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Enemies’ Is a Near-Perfect, Bittersweet Trip

You might hope that the pairing of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a writer who couples eroticism with wisdom, and Paul Mazursky, whose best films have been both juicy and insightful, would be a good one. But who could have predicted this?

“Enemies, A Love Story” (Wednesday at AMC Century 14) is stunning, a richly satisfying, perfectly realized film. Although there are still a few more movies to see before the season’s end, this one may be the year’s finest and most complex; clearly it’s the best of Mazursky’s career. But it’s something more, the brilliant dovetailing of a writer’s intentions and a film maker’s mature craft.

There’s the same wholeness of understanding here that permeated the best of John Huston’s films, “The African Queen” or “Fat City” or “The Dead”; adaptations that felt so full and so right that when you re-read the books, the characters and the actors merged. Now Mazursky, who co-adapted this screenplay with Roger L. Simon, has found in Singer his perfect author and the pleasure is all ours.

The time is 1949, the place is New York; more specifically the corners of New York that have become havens for Jewish refugees from Hitler’s deviltry. In Coney Island we find Herman Broder (Ron Silver), who eluded the Nazis by hiding in the hayloft of a Polish farm but whose nightmares about his ordeal are far from behind him. With him is his blond Polish wife Yadwiga (Margaret Sophie Stein), his family’s former servant, who saved his life and whom he has since married, as much from gratitude as anything else.

In the Bronx lives Herman’s passionate mistress Masha (Lena Olin, she of the bowler hat in “Unbearable Lightness of Being”), who with her mother (Judith Malina) has survived the camps. And soon on the scene is the first of the shocks to Herman’s somewhat jangled system: Natasha (Anjelica Huston), his first wife, whom eyewitnesses had reported shot by the Nazis and dumped into a pit with hundreds of other bodies. Although their two children were lost in the camps, Natasha has returned to life, acerbic as ever, and has emigrated to Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

One note is common to these survivors: a sense of being dead among the living. Even though Herman avoided the camps, the same miasma grips him too; pain at the loss of his children possibly complicated by guilt at not having been captured. Only Yadwiga is exempt; stubborn and optimistic, she is the film’s positive spirit.

A man in whose body sensuality and intelligence wage constant civil war, Herman tries to keep up with the demands of all three women with relative openness. He tells Natasha and Masha, the two most able to cope with the news, of the other’s existence. The pathologically jealous Masha believes none of it; Natasha, sophisticated and unflappable, isn’t surprised to learn he has a mistress, “What can you talk about with Yadwiga?” she says, sensibly.

The danger, of course, in telling even a snippet of “Enemies’ ” plot is that mentioning Herman’s serial wives and sweethearts may make it sound like an ethnic “Worth Winning,” one of the nastier ideas of the decade. “Enemies” is actually dark farce told in carefully detailed character studies, which rely entirely on the actors’ perfect pitch to keep them airborne.

Well, casting and subtle performance were always Mazursky’s long suits, yet even for him this cast is exceptional. At first glance, the biting, ironic brilliance of Anjelica Huston’s Natasha seems to be the film’s strongest asset, a performance which makes her Academy Award-winning Maerose in “Prizzi’s Honor” seem anemic by comparison. It still seems to be the film’s most informative creation: watching her we learn everything about caste, aristocracy and a lifelong sense of loss.

However, there is also Lena Olin’s mercurial Masha, playful, haunted, at peace only in one scene. Masha is an even more adept liar than Herman and certainly his equal in sensuality. In her hilarious comic sequence, we see the dimensions to Margaret Sophie Stein’s gentle, long-suffering Yadwiga, whose strengths emerge slowly until she blossoms into someone far more forceful than a put-upon house wren.

But then you realize Ron Silver’s complex shadings have made Herman the flint against which all three women strike fire. His life may be untenable, but if for a moment Herman becomes foolish in his moral confusion or if he becomes a scurrying wimp, the movie is lost. He never does; there’s a deep, pained intelligence behind Silver’s eyes; if finally, Herman Broder becomes as indecisive as Hamlet, he’s no less interesting a man.

Swirling around them all is a second ring of characters, most notably the great comic-poignance of Judith Malina as Masha’s mother, Phil Leeds as the crucial Mr. Pesheles, Mazursky as the hateful Leon Tortshiner and the slightly debatable theatricality of Alan King as Rabbi Lembeck.

Finally there is the sense of the city itself, conjured up by Mazursky’s usual team of craftsmen, particularly his veteran production designer Pato Guzman, whose crowded apartments or melancholy beachfronts become the story’s fifth character and his masterly costume designer Albert Wolsky, whose details for these 1949 clothes--crocheted snoods or cross-stitched peasant blouses--deliberately mirror a slightly earlier period that these refugees might still cling to.

Cinematographer Fred Baker uses a palette subtle as a hand-tinted postcard, and Maurice Jarre’s addition of klezmer rhythms to his score gives it just the authentic buzz that’s needed.

But it is Mazursky who has filled his teeming frame with these indelible faces, who sketches the activities at a Catskill resort with such affectionate satire and who so clearly understands the knife edge between laughter and tears on which Singer constantly balances. And it is Mazursky whose underlining at the close of “Enemies, A Love Story” (rated R for its steamy love scenes) gives it its soaring sense of continuity and healing.