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Enemies, A Love Story Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 4 Reviews)

The comedy potential is not capitalized on

Ron Silver plays a Jewish concentration camp survivor living in Coney Island (the time is c. 1950) with the non-Jewish peasant girl (Margaret Sophie Stein) who helped save his life during the war. He also has a Jewish mistress (Lena Olin) whom he visits constantly. One day his real wife (Anjelica Huston) from before the war (he thought she was killed) shows up. So now he's involved with three woman - definitely a man with a big problem.

But the movie refuses to take any big risks; it's obviously a very comic situation, but it pulls up short on rather than exploit that humor (one imagines it being handled much differently and better in, say, a Cary Grant-Catherine Hepburn picture of the '30s). The serious side of the storyline - memories of the war, Silver's insane passion for Olin - also goes only so far. We're left with a feeling of being cheated. The ending, which involves Silver and Olin and a last-minute decision that has dire consequences, seems too ambiguous. The movie is okay as far as it goes, but is disappointing in how it falls short of what it could have been.

Great movie. Lousy soundtrack remaster. Disappointing!!
I have to concur with another posted review. Played a rented DVD on my home 2-speaker system. The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is flat, muffled, and during several outdoor scenes, features a digital "howling" harmonic from background sound FX (street traffic, maybe?). It made the film difficult to listen to, and disappointing. The laserdisc release featured "Dolby Surround" audio (now called Dolby 2.0), which would indicate that someone messed this new release up in the transfer. Shameful.

Great film, awful DVD
I concur with other viewers who found the DVD unacceptable in sound quality. Oddly enough, it gets excellent reviews as a DVD transfer. They must have had a different copy. But the film itself remains as fresh and exciting as when it first was issued. Mazursky captures the spirit (if not all the nuances) of I. B. Singer's marvelous novel about Holocaust survivors in New York in the 1950s. None of the reviewers here seem either to have read the book or really understood the point of the film -- Herman Broder, ghost writer, who was hidden during the war by the Polish servant who saved him and marries her (Jadwiga), finds passion with Masha, who survived the camps with her mother (Eros and Thanatos certainly go together here), and discovers his first wife (Tamara), who was shot with her children by the Einsatzgruppen and left for dead, is actually alive. Each represents a different facet of the catastrophe, conveniently divided among the New York boroughs. Anyone, by the way, who has read anything of Singer, including this book, would recognize his very typical take on male sexuality. I would advise viewers to see this film (or see it again) and think more deeply about what's at stake in this ironic tragicomedy than look for mindless and shallow entertainment.

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