Toot, Toot, Tootseleh

By RICHARD CORLISS

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.

In outline, this sounds like a ghetto translation of sex-reversal farce: Tevye meets Tootsie. Yentl mines much judicious merriment from the plight of a girl who wants to prove herself a man but is in love with a man who's in love with the girl she has married. But there are sweet and subtle tones to the comedy. In three versions of the song No Wonder, Yentl muses in derision, then in awe, then in sympathy, on Hadass's domestic graces. Composer Michel Legrand and Lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman have constructed the score as Yentl's running Talmudic commentary on the genesis of her womanly desires. (That's why Patinkin doesn't sing.) The songs begin in a liturgical mode, heavy on recitative and minor chords. As Yentl enters the real world of passion and deceit, the melodies become more secular, and by midpoint, when Yentl's thoughts turn from intellectual to sexual love, the songs are swimming strongly in the American pop mainstream. It is the most romantic, coherent and sophisticated original movie score since Gigi a quarter-century ago; and its treacherous glissandi and searching wit find their ideal interpreter in Streisand's incredible Flexible Flyer of a voice. After two decades of hard work, that voice is still as smooth as mercury poured over dry ice.

Yentl is a big, good-looking movie with only three main characters--a chamber piece played in a Crystal Palace that shivers in the soft focus of sexual ambiguity. As director, Streisand has seen to it that Yentl and Avigdor and Hadass don't get lost in the sumptuous locations and somber, classical mise en scene. Patinkin has harnessed his talent and energy; he can bounce off a bookcase in the thrall of scholarship, or sit tense and still as Avigdor tries to figure out the riddle of Anshel's identity. Amy Irving, of the honeyed voice and witchcrafty allure, makes the role of an old-fashioned woman sexy and smart. And Streisand has fun playing a woman out of her time, a figure of both feminism and fun. In rabbinical drag she could pass for the comic David Brenner; in the tender scenes with Irving, she is the sassy Brooklyn girl coming to appreciate a Jewish Lithuanian princess.

Forget that Yentl is set in Eastern Europe. The film's true locus is the mind of Barbra Streisand, where the familiar conventions of the musical mix easily with the private compulsions of a born-again Jew who happens to be a Hollywood hot shot. On the evidence of Yentl, she has been other women as well: the adoring child listening to her papa, and now telling him what she has learned; the gawky teen-ager eyeing her less gifted rivals; the budding artist stretching the limits of craft and ego; the novice director showing tact and assurance behind the camera; the successful career woman using her power to realize a dream. Three cheers for chutzpah! --By Richard Corliss This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.