Enemies, A Love Story

Rating:
Summary: despair and despair
Review: It's revealing to compare director Paul Mazursky's adaptation of a book by Isaac Bashevis Singer, with Barbra Streisand's Yentl, also based on a I B Singer story. In spite of the author's objection to Streisand making her title "a film with music", at least her version retained Singer's sly wit. Regrettably Mazursky has drained all the humour out of his effort, with the music score by Maurice Jarre a promise of what we never get.
Part of the problem is Ron Silver as the main character, a man with a wife, a mistress, and then a former wife back from the dead, in 1949 New York. This is a delicious comic premise, but Silver is both humourless and unlikeable. Mazursky doesn't make it easy for him, particularly when our first sight of him is hiding from Nazis and allowing his wife to be beaten. The treatment gives Silver guilty visions but even these can't redeem him, so when the focus rests on his tortured preference for the temperamental mistress, we're bogged in sadomasochism. This may be very Jewish, but it's also awfully hard to watch. And Mazurksy's metaphor of the Coney Island ferris world, which Silver repeatedly looks to, falls flat, mainly because the wheel is always still.
Thank goodness for Angelica Huston as the former wife. She has a Garbo-like presence, and it helps that she's not like either the mousy wife or the sex pot mistress. She gets to deliver the best lines, including " If every man had his way, every woman would lie down a prostitute and get up a virgin", and "A slit throat cannot be sewn together again". She also gets that melodramatic standby, the scene of laughing/crying, but she pulls it off. The scene where she visits Silver and his new wife, the Polish Margaret Sophie Stein, who was Huston's old world servant, is probably the best realised in Singer-tone, even if Mazursky has Stein's screaming at believing Huston is a ghost go on too long. Stein gets a payoff laugh though when there is a second knock at the door and she runs off again in fear.
Alan King doesn't have much to do as a rabbi who Silver works for, but he does get to demonstrate the symbols of Jewish assimiliation - a goy wife and a black maid. Plus I like Phil Leedes as the man who exposes Silver's duplicity, even if the scene is disappointing. Leedes gets a funny line in response to King's re Silver "I thought you were a eunich" - "I wish I was such a eunuch".
My low opinion of this film is unusual, since it received favourable reviews. You can read Pauline Kael's more laudable one in her Movie Love collection, though even she admits that Mazurksy's restraint here is surprising. She says that "Mazursky pulls the rug out from under us, and we drop through the farce". I don't mind losing the rug, as long as the farce remains.

Rating:
Summary: Interminable
Review: worse than the subway ride from Coney Island to Da Bronx, and I was prepared to LOVE this film! pointless, no resolution, mawkish, did I say pointless? stick with "I Love You Alice B Toklas", Blume in Love, Next Stop Greenwich Village, and other of Mazursky's classics; when the best scenes are location shots of the subway, the boardwalk, and hanging salamis, you know something went terribly wrong. Oy!