Yentl

OSCAR WINNER - 1983
• Best Original Song Score

YENTL is a kind of fabulous outlier: an eccentric romantic musical drama that has no real equivalent in cinema. Based on a story, YENTL THE YESHIVA BOY, by the Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the film is distinctly literary, both in origin and feel; it very significantly opens on a shot of a basketful of beautifully worn, burnished books, it’s first major line of dialogue refers to a “wonderful book,” and it’s major trope — the interior monologue — is straight out of every novel you’ve ever loved.

The fact that YENTL’s monologues are musical of course has something to do with this being, in effect, “A Barbra Streisand Film.” Although this legendary filmmaker modestly refused the possessory credit, she in fact co-wrote (with Jack Rosenthal of CORONATION STREET fame), produced, starred in, sang — solo — every psychologically astute and beautiful song and made her directorial debut with this extraordinary movie. It’s hard to think of too many men who have accomplished the same astonishing feat; in fact, it’s impossible. And we bring this up here because, in many ways, Streisand’s long, difficult and admirably impudent struggles to make YENTL perfectly mirror the struggles of her eponymous heroine: a young Jewish woman in turn-of-the-century Eastern Europe who, after the death of her beloved teacher-father, determined to follow her passion and study the Talmud (wide-ranging commentaries on the Hebrew Bible) — and never mind that this is strictly forbidden to women by both law and society.

Streisand’s labor of love began soon after she made her incendiary movie debut in FUNNY GIRL (1968); falling hard for Singer’s story, she personally purchased the rights. Shockingly, it took another 15 years to bring this beauty to the screen — a period during which, despite her obvious “bankability,” company after company declined to finance. (Should we try to guess why? Could it have been the intellectual slant of the material? It’s quirkiness? Or perhaps, simply, the fact that the driving force here possessed a pair of breasts?) Only Streisand’s exceptional perseverance — again, not unlike Yentl’s — ultimately made the film (“My life, my passion, my dream,” she has called it) a reality.

She had the support of some extraordinary collaborators: Oscar-winning lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman (“The Way We Were,” the title song written with composer Marvin Hamlisch for the blockbuster 1973 Streisand film) read the script and instantly agreed with Streisand that it has “musical” written all over it. As Marilyn Bergman would say later, YENTL was about “a character with a secret… And this rich inner life becomes the score.” To write the music, Streisand called upon the sublime Michel Legrand, with whom she had previously joined forces for the chart-topping 1966 album, JE M’APPELLE BARBRA. A dazzling French romantic, steeped in European tradition (and also an Academy Award-winner, with the Bergmans, for “The Windmills of Your Mind, from 1968’s THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR), Legrand was the acclaimed composer of the stunning “sung-through” French masterpiece, Jacques Demy’s THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG (1964) The trio’s work with Streisand on YENTL would earn them yet another Oscar.

Thanks in enormous part, of course, to their star, who, apart from everything else, is in superb voice in YENTL. And to say that Streisand is in superb voice is honestly pretty lame; it’s like saying that the stars are beautiful, or that air is good to breathe. That voice is nothing short of a gift from God — appropriate for a movie where God and religion are major topics of discussion; it is a divine instrument for which it’s tough to discover the like. Here, it gives a profound emotional presence to the efforts of a young girl / woman attempting not just to make her way in the world — after the death of her loving father (tenderly played by Nehemiah Persoff), Yentl truly has nowhere to go and no one to rely on except herself — but also to find out who she is and what she wants from life.

An incipient scholar by nature — smarter and quicker than her father’s male students — she can’t bear the idea of being consigned to the domestic life her community expects her to undertake. When her darling Papa dies, she reads Kaddish over his grave — shocking the tender sensibilities of hidebound locals with her scholarship — then quickly and without fuss makes a momentous decision: to go into the world as a young man so she can continue her studies of the Talmud. This is what she lives for — her passion, as this film was for Streisand — and her success in achieving what seems to be a mad objective forms part of the fairy-tale atmosphere of YENTL. (In fact, the film opens with a chyron offering the equivalent of “Once upon a time”: “In a time when the world of study belonged only to men, there lived a girl called Yentl.”)

Yentl bravely makes her own luck; her very braininess leads her to the connection that will change her life: Avigdor, a brilliant young yeshiva student played by the extremely beautiful young Mandy Patinkin (whose beauty, as we’ll see, is pertinent here — but who sadly doesn’t have the opportunity to display the powerful tenor voice on offer in the likes of Broadway’s EVITA and SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE). Avigdor introduces Yentl — now renamed Anshel, after her dead brother — to the stimulating chaos of yeshiva life, one of the more remarkable aspects of the Jewish tradition. Streisand doesn’t shirk in displaying the thrill of discussion, argument and analysis: the world of the mind, lustrously on display in YENTL, is nothing short of pure joy. And Yentl’s joy is focused, particularly, on Avigdor, her ever-so-stimulating study partner.

But of course, when the mind is engaged, the rest of us — emotions and body included — tends to come along. In a genuinely remarkable scene, Yentl / Anshel roughhouses with Avigdor, then gazes, both rapt and aghast, as he strips down for a swim in the local river. As a woman, this writer must say that she has never quite seen the like, in any movie, over a lifetime of passionate moviegoing: the beauty of a male body as viewed by a female. We’re used to seeing women — their faces and bodies — objectified by the male gaze; this is, in some sense, what movies are all about. Here, for a change, we get the reverse; Streisand’s camera — a woman’s camera — looking at a beautiful man (and truly, Patinkin, relaxed and limber and, frankly, wet, is a veritable Greek god). Sorry, boys: it’s breathtaking — and without precedent.

It’s also, painfully, without recourse. Avigdor — despite some uneasy twinges — belies that Yentl / Anshel is a man; in any case, he is engaged to the lovely Hadass (Amy Irving), the absolutely perfect exemplar of everything Yentl has resisted becoming: utterly subservient femininity. “The moment she sees him,” Yentl sings in her head, “her thought is to please him.” Hadass’ concerns are what to wear, how to do her hair and meals: “To roast or to not roast, or better yet maybe a pot roast.” And Yentl’s judgments are only confirmed by Avigdor. “Don’t you ever wonder what she’s thinking?” she asks her beloved friend. Disappointingly, he answers, “No. What could she be thinking? Anyway, I don’t need her to think.”

As if all this were not enough to chew on, YENTL then up’s the ante. Hadass’ parents suddenly call off the engagement of their daughter and Avigdor; seems his brother’s cause of death was by suicide (a fact about which he has blatantly lied) and they’re alarmed about this potential for “bad blood.” Devastated, Avigdor suggests he next best thing: that Yentl / Anshel marry his girl. At least, that way, they can all still live together. The provocation fashion in which this all plays out makes of YENTL an even more suggestive and incendiary work of art, touching on issues of gender and sexuality that few films have ever dared to attempt.

Clearly, Barbra Streisand was not taking the easy road when she made her directorial debut. She chose an outré subject, setting and themes — and, while taking a deeply personal approach (the film, she has said, is dedicated to the father she never knew, who died when she was a baby), dared to make them universal. Further, she ensured that her film was not only thought-provoking, but also a visual stunner. Here, she had the assistance of cinematographer David Watkin (HELP!, OUT OF AFRICA); their collaboration (with Streisand telling Watkin that Rembrandt paintings were her ideal) gave us heart-stopping images of a lost Eastern European world — shot, for the most part in Czechoslovakia — reminiscent of the photographs of Roman Vishniac. Note, particularly, the light-drenched scenes in the yeshiva and the setting for “Papa, Can You Hear Me,” with Yentl a tiny figure lit by a single candle in an immense and frightening darkness.

No less a luminary than Steven Spielberg would call YENTL the most auspicious debut film since CITIZEN KANE. And while many would agree, the Motion Picture Academy conspicuously neglected Streisand’s multifarious achievements here. The filmmaker, over the years, has maintained a dignified resignation; “When it comes to assuming more than one major role on a motion picture,” she has said, “it’s something men are admired for. However, it seems that women are still perceived as a threat.” Not here. YENTL is nothing short of a triumph: challenging, beguiling and — quite simply — beautiful. Whatever your beliefs — political or social — may be, we dare you to watch the finale of this deeply humanistic film without shedding a few well-earned tears. Go on — we dare you.

- Julie Kirgo

1983

PG

Yes

5050070028461

Movie

2018-02-07 21:34:36

1.85:1

128

Canada

2

~£22.54

2026-03-17

2018-02-07 21:34:36