esrosedotblog

MESSY

We are mostly used to films that hew a centerline and follow the conventions. Today's Best NYTimes 1176 Films film is not that way. It is way messy and while it gets there in the end, it meanders.

Enemies—A Love Story (1989) is a Paul Mazursky film based on an Isaac Beshevis Singer novel.

A concentration camp survivor who cannot make up his mind ends up with three wives. Don't ask. Go see.

Mazursky tries to keep the complexity and ambiguity of life rather than simplify it. While he succeeds, this does not always make the story easy to follow or identify with.

I am not sure how much I actually enjoyed it. I laughed and got 'worried' and all. But, then I would get impatient with the characters. I wanted them to get on with it.

Of course, that is just what they were doing; getting on with it. I was stuck in the conventions and not always willing to move along with them.

Another thing is that this film is relentlessly Jewish. That is not a bad thing but it is a cultural gap to get over at all times; accents, customs, that sort of thing. I am familiar with the conventions; the stereotypes. They are there. But there is also something deeper. I think that I would grasp it and then it would shimmer away.

The ensemble performances by Ron Silver, Lena Olin, Anjelica Huston, Margaret Sophie Stein, Alan King, and Mazursky himself are great.

The entire set design as well as costumes are incredible. I actually 'smelled' the streets and the Coney Island locations. They are richly genuine. Remember, that this is part of my time and I was close to it; late forties and fifties; New York City. There is a segment at a resort in the Catskills that might as well have been filmed right near my 'boyhood home' in the Poconos.

I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5. We are having a good run here.