REVIEWS Streisand wins marks for ‘Yentl’ YENTL. Produced and directed by Barbra Streisand. Screenplay by Jack Rosenthal and Streisand. With Mandy Patinkin, Streisand, Amy Irving. At local theatres. This is a story that Barbra Strei- sand was determined to tell; it took courage and risk. The result in many ways is delightful — and in some ‘ways disappointing. But first, about the author, because without him there is no film: Isaac Bashevis Singer is a deservedly famous writer of Yiddish stories, and this is one of his best. In most ways Streisand does justice to the. work. It all takes place in 1904-05-in Eastern Europe. The location is not specified, but we get the impression it is Lithuania, somewhere in small outlying villages and towns. For this Streisand took her troupe to Czecho- slovakia, and the locations have the most authentic atmosphere; there are early 20th Century shtetles and ghettos. We meet Yentl as a determined young woman intent on subversion. And what is that? Studying. Her father, a wise and gentle man who loves his motherless daughter, teaches her how to read instead of insisting that she grow up to become a wife, cook, mender of socks and mother of six. Scenes in this early part of the film are relentless in dramatizing the male chauvinism of the religious Jewish male; it is disgusting and yet comically satirical. When her father dies, Yentl finds her ability to study the Torah and become a scholar cut off. No women are allowed in the men’s world of learning. Being slender, she decides to cut her hair, and become, with the aid of pants and jacket, collar and tie, a “boy.”’. She moves to another town, and with her knowledge of the Torah and other religious writings, she joins young men in this disguise, and wins admittance to the Yeshiva, the school for biblical learning. She is befriended by Avigdor, a handsome young bearded student (Mandy Patinkin) who. looks upon her as his younger brother, and the farcical elements take over. When the young students go for a nude swim in a lake Yentl must use all her wits to avoid being forced to join them. In fact, from now on, the film has the flavor of the recent Dustin Hoffman film “Tootsie”. Streisand certainly deserves credit for her determination to communi- cate her convictions. If in order to do, she must be almost every- thing — writer, director, producer, star. She may not win in every department, but her determination to “tell it as she sees it” is worth our attention. — Lester Cole The late progressive German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s message was brought to B.C.’s workers when his play Die Mutter (The Mother) toured Vancouver Island communities last month. Pro- duced by the First Vancouver Theatre Space Society, with original music by Canadian Bruce Jennings, Brecht’s rendition of the Maxim Gorky novel about workers’ action on the eve of the 1905 Russian revolution played to enthusiastic audiences in Port Alberni and Nanaimo. In Nanaimo, the Unemployed Workers Centre sponsored the Jan. 28-29 performances and is encouraging other action centres to become involved in cultural projects. ABCs ‘The Day After: The way a Soviet saw it — The following was written by Yuri Ustimenko, the San Francisco-based corres- pondent for the Soviet news agency Tass. It originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Nov. 23, 1983. 10 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 8, 1984 I The main reason I watched The Day After was entirely personal. I was five years old when bombs started falling on my native town in World War II, and too small to remember much of what was happening to me at that time. But I do remember ruins of the railway stations as our train was passing by on its way from the Ukraine to Siberia. On returning home I discovered that there was no home to return to. Our house was not as lucky as our train, and there was an acute housing problem, in fact an acute shortage of everything and hardly enough to eat. I also remember that very few of my schoolmates had both fathers and mothers, and quite a few had scars on their faces or limbs missing. I shall never forget the new teachers who entered our classroom, coming from the war, with the help of crutches. They taught us to hate war more than anything else. My feelings and my experiences, as far as I can judge, are shared by the movie makers in my country. Their films not only show that war is a tragedy, they always make it perfectly clear that war must be prevented. On the other hand, from what I’ve seen on the American screen, most often war is treated as a huge joke or a good chance to become a hero. The war films made in the USS. tend to be divorced from reality and either scare their viewers witless or feed them war propaganda. Very rarely do they tell the simple truth about wars — that they are horrible, senseless and must be avoided. “In this respect, The Day After is a wel- come change. Frankly speaking, given pres- ent political conditions in the United States, I never expected a major American TV company to come up with a film that spoke the unspeakable, namely, that nuclear dis- armament is infinitely better than a nuclear ~ arms race, Obviously, there are people at ABC who had sensed the general mood in the country, and not this country alone — a very strong sentiment against the rising threat of a nuclear war. But the political statement is not in the film at all. It came after The Day After was shown, with Washington officials rushing to various TV studios to explain and justify their policies, which reminded me of the old Russian saying: “The thief’s hat is on fire.” The saying originates from the tale about a wise man who had been asked to identify a thief among a huge crowd of people at the market place. So he cried out: “Look out, the thief’s hat is on fire,” and a man in the crowd clutched his hand to his hat and was caught. The Day After brings into American homes the horrors that the American public was conditioned to shrug off. Wars had always happened somewhere else, and the U.S. citizens were privileged to observe them in the comfort of their living rooms, making occasional trips to the refrigerator during commercial breaks. The Day After is being attacked by the * proponents of the arms race — they call it “building a nuclear deterrent,” but it boils down to a straightforward arms race — mainly because it depicts American homes being destroyed and Americans getting killed in America, not in some godforsaken place with a name no one can pronounce, let alone remember. The film is thought-provoking, but according to Stanford professor Paul _ Ehrlich, “wildly optimistic.” The horrors shown were “only the tip of an iceberg.” He added: “Within a few days of the war, it would be dark at noon in Lawrence, Kan- sas, as it would be over most of the North- ern Hemisphere, since clouds of soot from fire and dust from bomb detonations would block the sunlight from the earth’s surface. Survivors in Lawrence, if that city were spared a direct hit, would freeze, starve, suffocate, or die of thirst or radiation poi- soning in a dark nuclear winter. Thefé would be no recovery.” No matter how “optimistic” the ABC film may be, the scenes of death and des- | truction are horrible and not easy to watch. © But it well may be that the United States needs to be shocked into the modern world, shocked into realizing that today there is no longer a fortress America where U.S. citi- zens, and they alone, can escape the trage-_ dies of the outside world. They have grown accustomed to the idea that no one, but no one, can harm them and they are constantly being lulled into believ- ing that, no matter what, there are always Marines to the rescue. If not Marines, then the “star wars” or some other fairy tale thought up by the politicians to justify new military expenditures. ; There were no fairy tales in my child- hood. I lost my mother during the first © month of the war, and my father worked © practically 24 hours for seven days a week at — the hospital. The only toys I had were the — ones I could manage to make myself. My son, in his turn, had all the fairy tales he could keep his eyes open to before going to sleep and all the toys he could easily break. But we are one in the belief that his children and my grandchildren are entitled to their chance to listen to fairy tales and play with their toys or break them, as they please. Generations to come must have peace and for that we must preserve peace and avert the threat of nuclear war. As for The Day After, the strongest part of the film is the day before, when people go about their business not understanding, not caring or not being aware of the danger. And then “the guaranteed survivor of the nuclear war” — a common cockroach. The film shows that wars are being fought on Earth and those who live on this planet Earth had better act now before there is no one to watch ABC movies.