A film
review by Roger Ebert, December 9, 1983.
To give
you a notion of the special magic of Yentl,
I'd like to start with the following complicated situation: Yentl, a young
Jewish girl, wants to be a scholar. But girls are not permitted to study books.
So she disguises herself as a boy, and is accepted by a community of scholars.
She falls in love with one of them. He thinks she is a boy. He is in love with
a local girl. The girl's father will not let him marry her. So he convinces
Yentl to marry his girlfriend, so that at least he can visit the two people he
cares for most deeply. (The girlfriend, remember, thinks Yentl is a boy.) Yentl
and the girl are wed. At first Yentl manages to disguise her true sex. But
eventually she realizes that she must reveal the truth.
That is
the central situation in Yentl. And
when the critical moment came when Yentl had to decide what to do, I was
quietly astonished to realize two things: (1) I did not have the slightest idea
how this situation was going to turn out, and (2) I really cared about it. I
was astonished because, quite frankly, I walked into Yentl expecting some kind of schmaltzy formula romance in which
Yentl's secret identity was sort of a
running gag. You know, like one of those plot points they use for Broadway
musicals where the audience is really there to hear the songs and see the
costumes. But Yentl takes its
masquerade seriously, it treats its romances with the respect due to genuine
emotion, and its performances are so good that, yes, I really did care.
Yentl is Barbra Streisand's dream movie. She's been trying to make it for 10
years, ever since she bought the rights to the Isaac Bashevis Singer story it's based on. Hollywood told her she
was crazy.
Hollywood
was right -- on the irrefutable logical ground that a woman in her 40s can
hardly be expected to be convincing as a 17-year-old boy. Streisand persisted.
She worked on this movie four years, as producer, director, co-writer and star.
And she has pulled it off with great style and heart. She doesn't really look
like a 17-year-old boy in this movie, that's true. We have to sort of suspend
our disbelief a little. But she does look 17, and that's without a lot of trick
lighting and funny filters on the lens, too. And she sings like an angel.
Yentl is a movie with a great middle. The
beginning is too heavy-handed in establishing the customs against women
scholars (an itinerant book salesman actually shouts, Sacred books for men ... picture books for women). And the ending,
with Yentl sailing off for America, seemed like a cheat; I missed a final scene
between Yentl and her bride.
But the
middle 100 minutes of the movie are charming and moving and surprisingly
interesting. A lot of the charm comes from the cheerful high energy of the
actors, not only Streisand (who gives her best performance) but also Mandy Patinkin, as Avigdor, her
long-suffering roommate, and Amy Irving,
as Hadass, the girl Patinkin loves and Streisand marries. There are, obviously,
a lot of tricky scenes involving this triangle, but the movie handles them all
with taste, tact and humor.
It's
pretty obvious what strategy Streisand and her collaborators used in
approaching the scenes where Yentl pretends to be a boy. They began by asking
what the scene would mean if she were a male, and then they simply played it
that way, allowing the ironic emotional commentaries to make themselves.
There's
some speculation from Hollywood that Yentl
will be too Jewish for
middle-American audiences. I don't think so. Like all great fables, it grows
out of a particular time and place, but it takes its strength from universal
sorts of feelings. At one time or another, almost everyone has wanted to do
something and been told they couldn't, and almost everyone has loved the wrong
person for the right reason. That's the emotional ground that Yentl covers, and it always has its
heart in the right place. [Ebert’s rating: *** ½ out of 4 stars]
Labels:
drama, musical, period, romance
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