![]() ![]() Outside it, and although the story is presumably happening in the 1990s, she has the life of an unmarried woman of yesteryear – especially Hollywood yesteryear. ![]() Rose goes down a storm with her students in the lecture theatre. Where Cayatte’s heroine is ‘a sensitive and intelligent girl who is physically unattractive’, Rose Morgan (Streisand) is middle-aged and also a Columbia professor, of English literature. There’s not necessarily that much difference in the titles but did Streisand and co think the ‘ à’ was an ‘ a’?) As in the Cayatte, Streisand’s male protagonist is a professor: Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges), a mathematician at Columbia University, is about to publish a magnum opus years in the making. (From the title onwards: Le Miroir à deux faces translates properly as ‘The Two-Sided Mirror’. The source material is a 1958 French film by André Cayatte, which, from its Wikipedia description, seems to be an altogether more sinister piece. The film, with a dog’s dinner of a script (by Richard LaGravenese), is so consistently overacted, by a gifted cast, that the performances, too, can only be blamed on the director. It proves to be an egregious affirmation of Hollywood star power and glamour. It pretends to critique the tyranny of commodified female beauty. But The Mirror Has Two Faces is peculiarly objectionable. As in her two earlier features, Streisand also stars as in Yentl (1983), her directing debut, her appearance is crucial to the story. Barbra Streisand’s third film as director is powerful ammunition for those who deride her egomania. ![]()
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