YENTL (1983) ** In a back room of an Ivy League library somewhere there is a fetishist who desperately tries to think of anything besides this film. Barbra Streisand loves religious literature so much that she pretends to be a boy so that she can attend an all boys school. She falls in love with Mandy Patinkin so hard that she marries Amy Irving. On their wedding night she gets poor Amy drunk, in order not to sleep with her. Amy was in love with Mandy before, but after awhile she gets really hot on the idea of Barbra doing her. Barbra eventually shows Mandy her breasts, whereupon he questions whether she's a demon and makes out with her. The acting is all nice (Amy is wonderfully winsome as a Jewish version of The Stepford Wives) and once you get past the slight problem of believing that anyone could think that clean-shaven, long-lipped, Barbra-voiced Streisand is a boy the story works well enough. The Czech locations are more than suitable and some of the incidental music is bearable, so naturally it won an Oscar. Barbra's songs are almost uniformly horrid and themselves garnered two Oscar nominations. I was positive that it would end with a shot of the Statue of Liberty.
back to Brilliant Observations on 1776 Films home
go back home, or send me email
no more reviews! I want to buy your novel!