Enemies, a Love Story (1989)

Enemies, a Love Story is that rare romantic comedy-drama that feels like it has lived a whole life before the first scene: funny in the way people are funny when they’re panicking, and heartbreaking in the way memory refuses to behave. Paul Mazursky stages postwar New York as a smoky, bustling moral maze, and then lets Ron Silver’s nervy, self-justifying survivor stumble through it while Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin bring such intelligence and ache to their roles that every glance feels like a confession. The film’s tone is lush and rueful rather than cute—more adult melodrama than sitcom—carried by an evocative atmosphere and music that make the city feel like both refuge and reckoning. It isn’t for viewers looking for tidy romance or easy likability, but if you want a story where desire, guilt, and survival tangle into something bracingly human, this one lingers.

Enemies, a Love Story is trying to juggle dark postwar trauma with messy romantic farce, using Herman’s tangled relationships as a way to show how survival can twist love, faith, and identity. The problem is that Mazursky’s tone can feel slippery—one scene leans into wry comedy, the next into heavy anguish—and the pacing is loose enough that it may strike you as overlong and oddly shapeless rather than richly layered. If you need a tight, plot-driven romance or a cleanly structured drama, this will likely test your patience and feel more enigmatic than rewarding. Still, Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston, and Lena Olin bring sharp, lived-in performances, and when the film slows down to sit with grief and moral compromise, it can be quietly haunting.