YENTL directed by Barbra Streisand
Screenplay by Jack Rosenthal and Barbra Streisand
The Jews have a word for what it took to make this movie: chutzpah. Barbra Streisand—the producer, director, co-writer and star of Yentl—spent 15 years turning Isaac Bashevis Singer's 20-page story Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy into a 2-hr. 15-min. musical extravaganza. At 41, she dares to impersonate a Lithuanian girleen. She has twisted Singer's story—of a studious imp who dresses up as a boy and contrives to marry her best friend's fiancee—into a moral tale about three victims of circumstance and prejudice. She has found in this faraway fable aspects of her own autobiography, and made Yentl a metaphor for the long struggle of womankind to emerge into the lonely splendor that is Streisand. For her male co-star she hired Mandy Patinkin, who has wrapped his crystalline Broadway tenor voice around Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, then gave him no songs to sing; all eleven are Streisand solos. And she has inflated the production values until the humblest shtetl looks grand enough to house the Scarsdale Hadassah. Chutzpah, folks.
Streisand first read the Singer story in 1968, the year of her Funny Girl movie debut, and the single-minded passion that she brought to the project encourages skepticism. Like Streisand and the character she plays, Yentl is indeed aggressive, exotic, oversize, polarizing. No one is likely to react indifferently to this one-woman band. But as the long, lush picture gains momentum and confidence, it admits the viewer to a beguiling world where emotions can bubble out of low comedy, where familial friendship and carnal love intersect, where the dead exert their tenacious influence on the living, and a folk tale can transform itself into a bittersweet fairy tale. With Yentl, Streisand has gone for the emotional goods—to create a sweeping musical drama out of a tiny romantic triangle—and, miracle of miracles, she has delivered them.
"In a time when the world of study belonged only to men, there lived a girl called Yentl. Eastern Europe, 1904." A shy, clumsy thing with a burning intelligence, Yentl breaks Hebrew tradition and is instructed secretly in the Scriptures by her ailing father (Nehemiah Persoff, a grave, endearing patriarch). When he dies, Yentl resolves to fulfill her dream of studying at a yeshiva. She cuts her hair, dons a suit and strikes out on her own, calling herself "Anshel." Her new study partner is a handsome rabbinical student, Avigdor (Patinkin), for whom the Talmud holds all life's answers; it is like a beautiful, inscrutable woman who must be appraised, wooed, conquered. Avigdor's fiancee Hadass (Amy Irving) is beautiful too, and when her family forces him to break off the engagement, Avigdor persuades Anshel to ask for Hadass's hand. Having stepped into the breeches, Yentl now steps into the breach: she marries Hadass. Avigdor still loves Hadass but is strangely drawn to Anshel; Hadass is trying to divert her love from her former fiance to her new husband. And Yentl is desperately juggling the conflicting passions she feels for her wife and her would-be lover.