Word: yentl
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...YENTL directed by Barbra Streisand...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...