Love Comes Lately is a bittersweet film woven out of three Isaac Bashevis Singer stories about old age and the erotic imagination. Max Kohn (Otto Tausig) is a writer in his seventies who is increasingly haunted by his weakening body and ebbing sexual prowess.
The film opens with Max dreaming on an Amtrak train. In his dream, the conductor asks him if he sleeps with women anymore; the questioning becoming so intense and distressing that Max awakens, still disturbed by the interrogation.
The remainder of the film similarly slips from the objective to the fictional world, as Max daydreams, flirts, longs for lost loves, dreams and pours his angst into his literary work.
The film's main narrative is based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's story “The Briefcase.†In Singer's semiautobiographical work, Max is an aging New York writer who travels the lecturing circuit, defending both his literary and sexual pride. His academic hosts thoughtlessly remind him that he's not as important as Kafka; his lectures are poorly attended as more exciting campus activities lure his already thin audience. His ego receives a much-needed boost during another dismal campus visit when he is unexpectedly reunited with an attractive former student, Rosalie (Barbara Hershey).
In this memorable supporting performance, Hershey's Rosalie is an alluring and complex character-cynical and vulnerable, haunted life's disappointments. Drawn together by their shared past and a desire to blot out the present, Max and Rosalie find themselves in her apartment but not without complications, the most pressing of which is his steady relationship with the long-suffering Reisel (Rhea Perlman).
Stuck in New York, Reisel tends to her ailing mother, while the itinerant Max comes and goes. She sees evidence of Max's infidelity everywhere and one gets the sense that one more indiscretion will be the last straw. Perlman plays the role with great skill, never allowing Reisel to simply be a victim or nag.
She is jealous and suspicious, but Perlman allows us to see that hurt, disappointment, and Max's disregard for her feelings have hardened her into a person she does not wish to be.
Tausig's Max is as introverted and meek as Reisel and Rosalie are aggressive. He reacts to the people around him and as a writer, lives mostly in his mind - a device the director uses to explore the other two Singer stories on which Love Comes Lately are based. One of these tales appears as a dream and the other as a story that Max reads aloud to an audience. In the dream based on “Alone,†Max, filled with thoughts of unfulfilled desire and the fear of impotency, imagines that he has been thrown out of a Miami Beach hotel that abruptly goes bankrupt.
Consigned to a cheap abandoned motel, whose owner is embroiled in a crazy and passionate divorce, Max finds himself alone in a room with an attractive, but crippled Cuban housekeeper, Esperanza, memorably played by ELIZABETH PEÑA. Max desires her, but is married in his dream and turns her away. Esperanza believes she was rejected because of her infirmity and we are never sure whether it is guilt, fear or fidelity that motivates Max.
At the film's conclusion, Max reads a final story, “Old Love.†Again Max appears as the main character in his own story, this time as a retiree moved south to spend his dotage in Florida.
He meets his next door neighbor, Ethel (Tovah Feldshuh), a recently widowed woman who has lead a happy and fulfilling life with a loving and generous husband.
Ethel and Max are both faced with the question of how to live out their final days. They waver between trying to embrace new sensations and life's pleasures and simply celebrating the past, missing old friends and fending off regret and sadness. Ultimately Ethel and Max take separate paths and find different radically different solutions.
Schütte brilliantly captures the humor and bittersweet melancholy of Singer's writing. Love Comes Lately is based on three stories that draw on Singer's complex love life.
As a young man in Poland, Singer fathered a child with Runya Shapira-the journalist Israel Zamir (Singer in Hebrew). Accounts differ on whether or not the two ever married, but he left the mother and child in Poland when he left for America, promising that he would one day return. He never did, meeting his son for the first time some twenty-five years later.
During the 1930s, he met Alma Haimann at a resort in the Catskills and the two were married until his death. During the intervening years, Singer was romantically linked to an array of female secretaries and companions.
Alma was aware of many of his liaisons and the film captures both Singer's and Alma's perspectives on the temptations and terrible costs of these affairs. The combination of honest self-criticism and vanity that permeate so much of Singers writing are faithfully captured in the film.
Singer wrote for a generation of Jews who faced the annihilation of their people, their culture and their language. Although his writing does not often overtly mention the Holocaust, it is emphatically about questions of survival, preservation, and the challenge of embracing life joys in the shadow of great horrors. Rather than write in broad sociological terms, Singer makes these questions personal and specific and tied to the endlessly fascinating quirks of everyday people.