Barbra Streisand (1983)

In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story ‘Yentl the Yeshiva Boy’, the title character is determined to study Talmud – in defiance of Jewish custom and practice, which restricts Talmudic education and learning to men.  Her widowed rabbi father allows Yentl to discuss and debate Jewish theology with him, within the walls of their home in an Ashkenazi shtetl in Poland.  When he dies, Yentl cuts her hair, puts on men’s clothes and leaves the shtetl to pursue her scholarly ambitions.  She adopts the male name Anshel.  Already an excellent student, she’s accepted at a yeshiva.  Her study partner there is a young man called Avigdor, with whom Yentl falls in love.  Leah Napolin worked with Singer to adapt the material for the stage and the play opened on Broadway in 1975.  By then, Barbra Streisand had already optioned the story and, in 1983, realised her dream of bringing it to the screen.  Yentl, part of BFI’s extended musicals season, beginning this month, was the first cinema feature directed by Streisand.  She also starred in it, co-produced and shared the screenplay credit with Jack Rosenthal.

The film (which I’d not seen before) sets up its themes clearly, not to say obviously.  There are no credits at the start, just a couple of legends.  One announces the place and time as ‘Eastern Europe, 1904’.  The other situates the story more emotively – ‘in a time when study was for men only, there was a girl called YENTL’.  The opening scene is a market in the shtetl.  One of the stalls sells books – sacred books for men, storybooks for women.  Yentl tries to buy a sacred book and the (male) vendor refuses – until she says it’s for her father.  The description of her home life is nicely economical.  Her father (Nehemiah Persoff) tells Yentl to draw the shutters before they start talking Talmud:  ‘I trust God will understand – I’m not so sure about the neighbours’.  Streisand sings her first number, ‘Where Is It Written?’, thoughtfully and unshowily.  The music for the film’s songs was composed by Michel Legrand, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman.  According to Roger Fristoe on tcm.com, it was the Bergmans who, when Streisand showed them a Yentl script (this, according to Wikipedia, went through many versions), ‘exclaimed in unison’ that ‘This has to be a musical!’  That proved to be bad advice.

This isn’t so much because some of the songs aren’t great.  It’s rather because the musical element confirms the egotism of Streisand’s passion project.  This isn’t a traditional film musical.  For one thing, there’s no dancing – which isn’t necessarily a problem.   For another, the star sings all the songs, solo – which is.  Although Yentl is definitely the protagonist, there are other important people in the story – not just Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin) but also his fiancée Hadass (Amy Irving).  When her father (Steven Hill) puts an end to the engagement – he finds out Avigdor’s brother committed suicide and considers his prospective son-in-law tainted blood – Hadass looks to Anshel for comfort, and finds herself increasingly drawn to him romantically.  Hurt and angry, Avigdor too continues to confide in his study partner and friend.  Characters in musicals conventionally use song to express their feelings; Avigdor and Hadass have strong emotions to convey but must do so without singing them.  The fact that Mandy Patinkin had recently won a Tony for Best Featured Actor in a musical (in 1980, for Ché in Evita) underlines the unfairness of the Streisand monopoly in Yentl.

That said, there’s one highly effective musical sequence.  When Avigdor and Hadass are still betrothed, Anshel is invited to dinner for the first time at the house of Hadass’s parents.  Anshel/Yentl observes the confidential looks exchanged by the engaged couple, and the beautiful Hadass’s subservient role, as she serves dishes to the others at the dinner table.  Streisand’s face shows suppressed jealousy at the sight of Avigdor’s and Hadass’s private communication.  The words of the song ‘No Wonder’, sung inside her head, fuse that feeling with indignation about traditional gender roles – an indignation that helped trigger Yentl’s journey to the yeshiva and led her to meet the man now causing her jealousy:

No wonder he loves her,

No wonder at all.

The moment she sees him,

Her thought is to please him.

Before he even knows that he’s hungry

She’s already there with his plate …

The emotional complexity of this is satisfying.  Yentl’s persisting secret means that much of what Streisand sings is internal monologue, unheard by others, which often works well.  It’s no coincidence that the worst number is the last, when Yentl, having finally revealed her true identity to Avigdor and Hadass, sets sail for America and relative freedom.  On board the ship carrying her and hundreds of other emigrants to the New World, she belts out ‘A Piece of Sky’ (which also incorporates fragments of the more haunting ‘Papa, Can You Hear Me?’, the film’s best-known song).  Streisand seems unable to decide whether or not Yentl’s fellow passengers are aware of her performance.  Some of them ignore her; others stand transfixed as she heads down the ship’s gangway towards the camera.  Besides, the shipboard setting inevitably calls to mind the climax to ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade’ in Funny Girl.  This grandiose, musically conventional finale is altogether a mistake.

Directing herself, Streisand gives one of her best-judged performances – for some of the time.  Her playing of Yentl in the shtetl scenes is mercifully different from her supercharged interpretation of the still-a-nobody heroine at the start of the abominable A Star Is Born.  Even so, there’s a double disguise involved, and a double suspension of disbelief required, here.  Yentl needs to pass herself off as a young man; Barbra Streisand needs to pass herself as not Barbra Streisand.  Since she’s not an actress able – or, at any rate, willing – to immerse herself in a character, neither of these things happens.  According to Wikipedia, Yentl’s age was increased from sixteen in the source story to twenty-six in the film, the better to accommodate forty-year-old Streisand – though since she’s disguised as a man most of the time, I’m not sure why.  Avigdor and the other hirsute yeshiva students initially tease Anshel that he doesn’t need to shave but no one ever mentions that his voice hasn’t broken either.  Anshel is incongruous in the group not because he looks like a girl – he does, but we accept that someone wearing men’s clothes a century ago is assumed to be male – but because he looks like an adolescent.  This wouldn’t be quite such a problem if the story didn’t require Anshel, in due course, to marry Hadass.

Some elements of the gender concealment/sexual confusion plot are strong, thanks in large part to Mandy Patinkin.  For those of us familiar with him mostly through his recent role in the (much too) long-running HBO television series Homeland, Patinkin’s presence and playing in this film, made when he was just thirty, are a revelation. In his early scenes, his virile vitality is highly charismatic:  it’s easy to see why Yentl finds Avigdor attractive.  Streisand animates the yeshiva scholars’ good-natured intellectual competition very well – and self-confident, almost cocky Avigdor is always at the centre of their debates.  A scene in which the young men go skinny dipping, and Avigdor tries and fails to get the overwhelmed Anshel to join them, is both funny and distressing, and admirably played by Streisand and Patinkin.  This is also the first time, though not the last, that Avigdor holds Anshel’s gaze for several seconds.  His eyes suggest he’s as disconcerted by what compels his gaze as Anshel is disconcerted to be held by it.  When Yentl eventually reveals her true identity to Avigdor, he’s horrified and incredulous, and calls her a ‘demon’.   On reflection, he admits to her that he’s reassured too:  the attraction he felt towards Anshel wasn’t, as Avigdor silently feared it was, homosexual.

Elsewhere, the cross-dressing comes over as a shallowly comical matter, a gender reversal of the Some Like It Hot set-up – notably in the extended wedding night scene between Anshel and Hasadd, with the groom urgently thinking up reasons to postpone consummation of the marriage.  There’s also a queasy earlier sequence when Yentl, knowing she’s falling for Avigdor, undresses in private.  The camerawork, designed to tantalise, would be uncomfortable even with someone else directing the scene; since Streisand is shooting her own body, the effect is smugly narcissistic.  She visualises Amy Irving much more pleasingly and David Watkin’s lighting does full justice to her lovely face.  Irving’s portrayal of Hadass is limited but she’s an unusual blend of docile and inscrutable, and eventually touching.  It’s her quality of naivete, rather than Streisand’s comedic aplomb, that gives the wedding night episode what substance it has.

The most controversial aspect of the movie awards season in early 1984 was that Streisand, after winning the Golden Globe for Best Director for Yentl, didn’t receive even a nomination from either the Directors Guild of America or the Academy.  The film won an Oscar for Legrand and the Bergmans (for the song score as a whole) and was nominated in several other categories but the snub to Streisand is what’s remembered – for two reasons.  First, it resonated with Yentl’s central theme of patriarchal restrictions on what women can do.  Second, and in retrospect, it was part of a sequence of Oscar results that, taken together, seem to prove Streisand’s unpopularity with the Academy.

This sequence really started in 1969, when she won the Best Actress Oscar, for Funny Girl, in a tie with Katharine Hepburn:  Streisand should have been a clear winner.  She did win a second Oscar, in 1977, for co-writing the song ‘Evergreen’ in A Star Is Born, but, once she started directing, the run of high-profile losses was sustained.  Her next film after Yentl was The Prince of Tides (1991):  Nick Nolte was expected by many to win the Best Actor Oscar but lost out to Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs.  Six years later, one of the biggest upsets in Academy Award history occurred when the Best Supporting Actress award went to Juliette Binoche in The English Patient – not to Lauren Bacall, receiving her first (and only) Oscar nomination at the age of seventy-two, in Streisand’s The Mirror Has Two Faces.

Streisand hasn’t directed another feature since.  Perhaps the organisers of the Oscars show were acknowledging and semi-apologising for slighting her and her films when they invited Streisand to present the Best Director award in 2010.  ‘Well, the time has come …,’ she said, after opening the envelope and before announcing the name of Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker.  Streisand is quoted in Roger Fristoe’s tcm.com note as saying that ‘In Hollywood, a woman can be an actress, a singer, a dancer … but don’t let her be too much more’.  One female winner of the Best Director Oscar isn’t enough to disprove those words but the ‘too much more’ also hints at part of why the multi-tasking Streisand was so disliked as a film-maker by this particular patriarchy.  When she made Yentl, she wasn’t the first Hollywood star to take a starring role in her directing debut – but she went on to star each time she made a movie, playing opposite Nolte in The Prince of Tides and Jeff Bridges in The Mirror Has Two Faces.

Some elements of Yentl’s storyline are weak.  In particular, Avigdor obviously must hang around after the end of his and Hadass’s engagement but there’s not a sufficiently good reason – in terms of plot, as distinct from romantic imperative – for him doing so.  The scene in which Yentl tells him all requires her and especially Avigdor to cover a lot of emotional ground in an absurdly short time.  In short order, he denounces her; tells her he’s always felt something for her; decides, with her encouragement, to go back to claim Hadass as his bride (as I understood it, Hadass’s marriage to Anshel could be annulled); and bids farewell to Yentl for ever.  It would have been fun to see Avigdor explain the situation to Hadass’s Orthodox parents but you can’t have everything.  You’re bound to think, though, that’s what Streisand wanted to have here. The concluding lyrics of ‘A Piece of Sky’ seem all too apt for the person singing it:

What’s wrong with wanting more?

If you can fly – then soar!

With all there is – why settle for

Just a piece of sky?

It’s a real shame Barbra Streisand didn’t get Michel Legrand and the Bergmans to write just one or two numbers for someone else to perform in Yentl – didn’t resist the temptation to turn it into a one-woman show.   

15 October 2019