Yentl

TCM is running a double feature of Barbra Streisand films tonight. I've blogged about the second, The Way We Were at 10:30 PM, before. The first is Yentl at 8:00 PM. I was too young to see it in the theater when it came out, and never got around to watching it in the intervening years. But the last time TCM ran it I recorded it; with it showing up again in short order I decided to watch that showing in order to be able to do the blog post on it.

Yentl was famous in its day for, I think, its unique plot and the fact that Barbara Streisand had greater responsibility for a major motion picture than almost any woman had had up to that point. It's based on a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer born in what would now be Poland but was then part of the Russian Empire, emigrating to the US to escape the Nazis and becoming a writer in Yiddish. Streisand had read the story and since the time of Funny Girl had wanted to make a movie version of it, but for various reasons that took a long time.

The title of the original Singer story, Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy, gives a good quick synopsis of the story. Streisand plays Yentl, a seeming spinster living with her father, Rabbi Mendel (Nehemiah Persoff), in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe in 1904. Dad teaches local boys the Talmud, the commentaries on the Torah and the basis for Jewish religious law and dispute resolution. Yentl having overheard all her father's teachings, would like to study Talmud herself. But she's female, and since women are the only ones who can carry babies to term and provide the next generation of Jews, that and other domestic duties are a Jewish woman's lot in life, not Torah and Talmud study. Yentl chafes at this, studying with her father in secret and never getting married despite being in her mid-20s, which is seen as a bit scandalous for the early 20th century.

And then Dad dies, with Yentl reading the Kaddish at his funeral, something that is also seen as a bit scandalous because Orthodox Judaism even in its religous services kept men and women largely separate. The local women come to "help" clean Yentl's house of her father's things that she would no longer have any use for, but Yentl is aghast when they want to take the books. So she gets a brilliant idea. She cuts off her hear, starts wearing men's clothing, and runs away to the big city, where she'll try to pass herself off as "Anshel", using the name of her dead brother, so that she can study Talmud.

This being Barbara Streisand, you have to wonder how anybody would have taken the ruse that she's a man seriously; indeed, a major plot point in the movie is Yentl trying to navigate keeping her secret a secret. This becomes complicated when she meets Avigdor (Mandy Patinkin), a fellow yeshiva student. You get the impression that deep down inside, he already knows Yentl's secret, although the screenplay suggests he doesn't. He too is in mourning, for his late brother who died of, well, that's another plot point for later in the movie. Avigdor has been matched by the matchmaker with Hadass (Amy Irving), a woman who really does love Avigdor, and the feeling is mutual. In theory, Hadass and Avigdor should marry, Yentl should emigrate to America and become a Reform Jew, although even the Reform Jews weren't ordaining women until several decades later.

But that would end the movie fairly quickly. Instead, Hadass' family learns the truth about Avigdor's brother, which is that he killed himself, suggesting there might be mental illness in Avigdor's family and thus a valid reason to call off the marriage. Yentl as Anshel then marries Hadass in order to keep all three of them close together. Yentl obviously is not able to consummate the marriage, and this by itself should be a reason to invalidate the marriage. But it's still going to take a while to get to that point.

At the time of its release, Yentl both received critical praise and was the butt of quite a few jokes, picking up Razzie nominations as well as Oscar nominations. Part of the problem is that I didn't find Streisand believable as a man. Another part is that, in order to get the movie made, Streisand and her collaborators turned the movie into, if not a full musical like Funny Girl, something that was dominated by Streisand's singing. (The ending sequence also made me think of Streisand on the tugboat in Funny Girl. To me, this gave Yentl entirely the wrong tone.

On the other side, part of getting the movie made and I'd guess keeping costs down involved filming in Europe, with a lot of location shooting being done in Communist Czechoslovakia. The cinematography is lovely, and I think the best part of the movie. Streisand co-wrote the screenplay, and also directed. While neither is bad, I really did get the impression at a lot of points of a bit of self-indulgence in the direction.

So while I'd give a decidedly mixed review to Yentl, it's also the sort of movie you should definitely watch and judge for yourself.