"The Mirror Has Two Faces" A Film Review by Linda Lopez McAlister on "The Women's Show" WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL November 23, 1996 Barbra Streisand is back with a new film she has co-produced and directed called "The Mirror Has Two Faces," and I found it to be the most enjoyable of all her films I've seen (i.e., "Yentl," "Prince of Tides"--I missed "Nuts.") Streisand is such a talented and intelligent woman, with so many resourses at her command, and, she's supposedly such a world-class perfectionist no wonder that the films she creates are invariably complex, interesting, and very well made. She hires the best people she can find for everything, and it definitely pays off in the quality of the finished product. I really enjoyed this film. It's a highly intelligent romantic comedy about mature if somewhat misguided adults. Once you say the words "romantic comedy" you know how it's going to turn out, but here, the fun is in watching and listening to the process by which the two lovers overcome the considerable obstacles they find--or put--in their paths. Rose Morgan (Barbra Streisand) is a professor of lit at Columbia; Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges) is a professor of math at Columbia, but they don't know each other. Both Rose and Gregory have had numerous failed relationships. We don't learn too much about Gregory's story, except that when he's in love he's so overwhelmed by it that it just takes over his life and he can barely function. Rose, despite her obvious success as a teacher students love, has very little self-esteem in the emotional realm, the result of having a very beautiful and monumentally vain and self-centered mother (Lauren Bacall). Rose's sister, Claire, (Mimi Rogers) is more conventionally attractive but also feels badly about herself and is on her third unahppy marriage (this one to Alex (Pierce Brosnan) who first dated Rose but then he dumped her to marry her more attractive sister. This, of course, just reinforces Rose's hopelessness about ever finding a love relationship that that will last. The only men who even call her are nerds like Barry (Austin Pendelton). To get the plot rolling, Gregory, in despair after an encounter with an ex-wife, calls a telephone sex line for advice and (in a very funny scene in which you can see the unlikely looking woman behind the sexy-voice on the phone) and places a lonely-hearts ad. Claire answers the ad pretending to be Rose. Gregory and Rose check out one another's classes and Gregory just happens along as Rose is lecturing on the notion of Courtly Love where the expectation was that the love relationship would not be a physical one. He is utterly taken with this idea and doesn't stick around long enough at the class to know that Rose certainly doesn't buy it for this day and age. To cut to the chase, they get married based on Gregory's expectation that theirs will be a marriage based on respect, friendship, companionship but not on sex. The rest of the film is about how this works or doesn't work. What I liked about this film is both the way the characters are developed and that it deals with ideas and issues you seldom see on film These are people you can't help but care about and commiserate with. Th exploration of the mother/daughter relationship in which the once spectacular mother who has so overshadowed her daughters is now facing what it's like to be aging and is for once forced to think about what effect her vanity and competetiveness has had on her daughters is quite moving. The audience for this film last night, at any rate, seems to be predominantly older white women. There were hardly any young women or men in the theater when I saw it. I suspect the idea of going to a film that purports to be about a non-sexual relationship is unappealing to young people. That's too bad. For one thing, a loving sexuality is vindicated in the end, and it would be very good, it seems to me, for a wider range of people to consider the issues raised in this film about the relationship between love, lust, friendship, mutual interests, respect. One of the funniest lines in the film comes from George Segal who plays a senior professor who is involved sexually with a long series of women half his age with whom he has nothing in common; and then he complains when he gives one of them a copy of "A Farewell to Arms" and she thinks it's a diet book. There's also a lot of commentary here about what constitutes beauty a and the pressures on women to conform conventional ideals of beauty. Even Rose succumbs to the makeover routine, at least for a time. Anyway, I liked "The Mirror Has Two Faces" a lot. My admiration for Barbra Streisand as a filmmaker continues to grow. For the WMNF Women's Show, this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this review without permission of the author: mcaliste@chuma.cas.usf.edu.