Enemies: A Love Story (1989) Reviews

Complicated and hardened out of the civilian causalities and atrocities of WWII, the characters in Enemies, A Love Story present an idiosyncratic answer to easily digestible happy-shiny Holocaust survivor tales. These people are damaged, but most of them have managed to rise above the ashes of their destroyed lives and rebirth themselves as members in a society. How functional they are is entirely debatable.

It tells the story of a quadrilateral relationship between a man who survived the Holocaust by hiding in a hay loft thanks to his housekeeper, who he has now remarried out of gratitude more than anything, his mistress, who survived the concentration camps but never made it completely out, and his ex-wife, whom we are told died in the concentration camps before she comes barreling into the story with a caustic humor and need to get on with things. He loves all three of them, and how could you not? They’re all beautiful, intelligent and engaging women. It would be foolish NOT to love all three of them.

But each relationship gives him as much satisfaction, in every sense of the word, as it does neurosis and anxiety. Lena Olin, as his mistress located in the Bronx, starts the film as a sensual, highly erotic woman who seems to have a touch of darkness around the sides. As the film progress we learn her dark secrets and she becomes more and more unhinged. Margaret Sophie Stein is the housekeeper-turned-wife; she worships at her husband’s feet as a way of coping with the fact that he won’t allow her to have a child. Anjelica Huston is the wife whom he was told died in the camps. Her character is both caustic and filled with warmth since she sees the flaws and strengths in all of the characters and accepts them for who they truly are.

And Ron Silver stars as Herman, a man who is afraid of happiness. He is a victim of his own making, made worse by hiding out in the hayloft while everyone he knew and loved died all around him. Happiness has no value or meaning from him since he’s never known how or why it exists. We know very little about him, except what we learn by proxy from the women in his life. Or should that be lives, since he mercurially shifts from one set of personalities to another depending on which one he is with?

It should go without saying that the acting is of the very finest quality, but I shall say it anyway. Olin and Huston in particular hit upon something very special with their character readings. But it’s the way that the film never drips into saccharine sentimentality or descends into some kind of grand guignol psychological cluster-fuck that truly makes it something special. It alternates between darkly comic moments and believably warm and humane scenes perfectly. It has an essence of lives being lived and trying to be picked-up and moved along with.

And, at the end, all we can say is that every character gets exactly what they deserve either by fate’s trickery or designs of their own making.