Star Reflections Streisand Sees Much Of Herself In “The Mirror Has Two Faces”

Ever since she sat in front of a backstage mirror as Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl” and self-deprecatingly drawled, “Hello, gawjuss,” Barbra Streisand has in one form or another starred in the longest-running psychodrama in show business.

It goes something like this: Not-so-classic beauty gets - or sometimes doesn’t get - handsome guy after an uphill struggle.

On Friday, Streisand will open “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” her 16th movie, the third she has directed. In it, she plays a Columbia University lit professor eating her heart out because a handsome math prof played by Jeff Bridges wants to marry her but omit sex.

Before it’s over, there’s dancing in the streets. “The Mirror Has Two Faces” is, after all, a romantic comedy, a throwback, in fact, to the films Streisand made in the ‘70s.

Movies being movies, the actors in “The Mirror Has Two Faces” wore long underwear under their bedclothes because the filming in Manhattan was done during the winter. Streisand smiles as she recounts the process. She’s sitting dead center in a hotel suite turned TV studio. The last on-camera interview has ended, the lights are lowered, and Streisand, blue eyes visibly relaxing, skin petal-smooth, says, “Yeah, it’s sort of a throwback to ‘Funny Girl,’ isn’t it? And maybe to ‘The Way We Were.’

“I mean, there’s the self-deprecating humor, and this person who isn’t supposed to think of herself as pretty. Rose (her character in the film) and I have a lot in common, I would say.

“But that’s why one chooses to play a role. You understand that character, you know? You gravitate to roles because of a personal affiliation with that story, that character.”

At 54, Streisand has arrived at a certain peace with herself. Megastardom, analysis and that Hollywood anathema - maturity - can do that for you. Yet she’s far from oblivious to the way her latest role taps into her own personal mythology and her experience growing up dysfunctionally in Brooklyn after her father died when she was 15 months old and her mother remarried, had a daughter with her new husband and left Streisand emotionally stranded.

An old photograph of her character’s father in the film is her real father, who was an English teacher like the character she plays in the new movie.

“My character also teaches at Columbia University. My father went to Columbia University. And Rose wears black, and I’ve always loved black. When I was scouting locations, I found this building on West End Avenue. A man who lived there came over and told he me he remembered me when I was 18 taking (voice) lessons there with my first teacher, Peter Matz. I forgot that. And the scene when I’m sitting in the kitchen with my mother, played by Lauren Bacall, was based on a conversation I had with my mother four years ago.

“It’s actually my mother who never told me I was pretty. The words in the film are her words when I asked her what I looked like when I was a little girl. You know, we play out the roles that our parents assign to us. I was the smart kid. I was the funny kid. My sister was the pretty kid. We play our roles until we come into a state of consciousness that says, ‘I will separate from my parents’ view of me.’

“That’s one reason I make movies, I think, to really get into an area that I want to look into and explore for my own growth. I thought it was time to re-examine my own personal concepts of beauty and love and romance. I love mythological material. (Screenwriter) Richard La Gravenese originally had Rose lecturing about Inana, the archetypal woman who journeys into the underworld and comes out a whole woman.”

Streisand unhesitatingly says she’s a born romantic, then hastens to add that her idea of a romantic evening is to eat food in bed and watch a video. Otherwise, she says, the only TV she watches is CNN and CSPAN.

As for mirrors, she adds, she spends little time gazing into them. “I think that beauty is in the heart of the beholder,” she says. “It may be that the first connection is in the eye. But that’s completely superficial. It depends on what’s underneath that person’s veneer to make a love relationship. I mean, there are many beautiful women and handsome men that have a lack of self, a lack of character and generosity and kindness. And then they become less beautiful.

“Growing up, I was an outcast, kind of. You know, kind of a strange kid. Growing up with one parent, wanting to be an actress, wanting to escape real life and go into this world of the imagination and make believe. I guess I decided to create life, make it happen the way I want it to be. As a teenager I was kind of lonely. I had one date in high school. This is the film I would have loved to see as a teenager, where at the end she integrates herself and becomes some person in the middle who cares about how she looks, but not to the extent of becoming a glamour queen.

“I was always an actress first. I became a singer because I couldn’t get a job as an actor. Then I thought of making some of my own movies. On a set, I’d say to myself, ‘Why is that director letting that actor get away with that level of performance? Why is that camera over there? Why is he doing that?’ So I decided to take more control over my own work. That’s why I became a director.

“I was frightened of directing, of course, just as I was frightened of performing live. That was the challenge, overcoming the fear. I see film as music, I guess. I hear the rhythm of scenes. When the rhythm is not right, it doesn’t feel right because probably it’s not coming from a truthful place.

“Look, when I made ‘Yentl,’ I saw a picture of a street in Hungary,” Streisand says, elaborating on her creative process. “And there’s a 3-inch body of water coming down the street. I just loved the image, so that was one of my first images in the film. And she crosses over. Her leg actually crosses over that tiny body of water. Then, when she disguises herself as a boy, she crosses a stream on a raft to go to the yeshiva. Then later, when she enters the big city, she crosses over a really big river. Then, to have the opportunity to study like men did at that time, she crosses an ocean.

“You know, I didn’t sit and think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting - a 3-inch body of water goes to a stream, then to a river, then to an ocean.’ Afterward, I thought, water is the symbol of the unconscious and a feminine symbol. Maybe that’s why I did it, but I never would have thought of it intellectually. It just seemed visually and sensually correct. That’s the level I want to operate on. That’s why I hate interviews. Because I have to define what it is I did out of feeling. Basically, I do things because they feel right, and that’s the truth of it. I go by my feelings. I always trusted my instincts, and when I haven’t, I’ve been screwed.”

Which brings us to the power thing. Streisand didn’t get an Oscar nomination for “Prince of Tides” although it was well received. She’s slightly hurt and bewildered by her control-freak reputation.

“It’s hard work making a movie,” she says. “Somehow hard work is rewarded when it’s the male. But something about it, in society’s eyes, doesn’t seem to fit women. I used to be embarrassed and defensive about it. Now I say, ‘Are you kidding? Of course I want utter and complete control over every product I do.’

“You know, the audience buys my work because I control it, because I am a perfectionist, because I care deeply. My next album will be one I’ve been planning ever since I heard a song sung at Virginia Kelly’s (President Clinton’s mother) funeral, a spiritual called ‘In the Presence of the Lord.’ After a long vacation, I’ll make that album. Someday, I’ll make another album I’ve been thinking about, the follow-up to the Broadway album, one that will focus on movie music. But it takes time and planning and working with the right people. You know, nobody says, ‘Why is your doctor such a perfectionist?’

“I think it’s a sexist attitude. It still hurts, after all these years. I’m always kind of shocked by it, but that’s the way it has to be for a while, you know? … I’m growing out of this defensiveness. But you know, I have wonderful men friends (she’s seeing actor James Brolin) and they’re seeing the light.”