In an interview about Meet the Fockers Barbra Streisand said that the reason she took the role was because of the scene where she gets to massage Robert De Niro. She claims to love massage and explained that she worked out the scene with her personal masseur. I had a massage yesterday and during the treatment I kept thinking, "I can't beleive people have this done for pleasure." Admittedly, my neck and shoulders were like 'massaging a lump of concrete' (so the therapist said) but I have had massages before that haven't been painful and didn't particularly think they were fun either. She said, "you seem to find it hard to relax," and I replied, "I would be fine on my own but lying half naked being pummeled by a complete stranger doesn't exactly put me at my ease." I am going to give it another go though because I think it has helped my voice and I know it's wrong to be holding that much tension in my neck and shoulders. If I keep it up, I might get to be like Ms Streisand and love massage.
Barbra Streisand has been a quiet feminist hero of mine since 1983, when I first saw Yentl. Her singing was always inspirational. She has the best vocal control of anyone I have ever heard but she was far from cool. I remember standing in the record shop when I was about 13 and picking up her album, Wet (with songs about water) and Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon and a much older, cooler boy laughing at me so much that I eventually put the Wet album back (although I did go back for it when no one I knew was looking). But in 1983, she became all kinds of cool to girls like me, who wanted to think.
Yentl is probably the best feminist movie I've ever seen. Most films don't pass the Bechdel test, even now. To pass this test a movie has to have two named female charaters who talk to each other about something other than a man. THAT'S ALL. They don't have to say anything profound, they don't have to be lead characters they just have to exist in their own name. You would think that all films are representative of real life these days but still many fail to even have women talk to each other. The Great Gatsby, for example, has several named female characters but they never talk to each other, which can not be representative because the women I know talk to each other all the time. Even movies that pass the Bechdel test are often lacking in any meaninful dialouge that can speak to a woman in any way at all.
Yentl should have paved the way, as a successful film that was about a woman, directed by a woman, made by a woman that had a really strong feminist message. It made me angry in 1983 and it made me angry when I watched it again today. Sometimes we need to be angry. When I watch it I can never understand how women allowed themselves to become suppressed for so long. Why did we put up with being told we couldn't read the sacred texts? Why did we allow ourselves to be slaves to men? Why didn't we talk to each other and make things better? There are still places where girls can't be educated (look at what happened to Malala). What I really love about Yentl is that at the end they don't sacrafice the story for the sake of a romanic 'happy ever after'. Also, it has my favourite dialogue between two women in a film:
"You look pensive."
"No, just thinking."
Last song in Yentl - says it all really
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