The Mirror Has Two Faces (DVD, 1998, Subtitled French, Spanish, and Korean; Closed Caption)

In "The Mirror Has Two Faces" Barbra Streisand directs, produces, and stars in her third tri-part motion picture. This movie is based upon Andre Cayatte's (1958) French film LE MIROIR A DEUX FACES. Streisand (Rose Morgan) casts herself in the lead role. Professor Gregory Larkin (Jeff Bridges) and Professor Rose Morgan are Columbia professors whose teaching styles couldn't be more different.

Morgan's is humanities, student interactive and centered, alive, vibrant, and uses everyday examples to stress her points. Larkin's is mathematics. Dull science where even his back is turned as he scrawls forumlas on the black board which bore the disengaged students to death. He can hardly get them to come to class without using threats.

Larkin puts an ad in the paper for a platonic cerebral relationship with a woman whose looks don't matter. Streisand plays herself way down from the start to look extra frumpy, for the frumpy professor part. Morgan's 'more attractive' sister, eager to pair her sister with someone who she might be compatible with, answers the ad instead, for Morgan. When Larkin shows up and goes to one of her dynamic classes he becomes enthralled with her. She's exactly what he's looking for because when he's engaged in a hot sexual romance with a drop dead gorgeous woman he cannot write he's so distracted by the relationship. Morgan's class was on relationships that are distinctly platonic . . . until Larkin leaves before she finishes the class which ends in a commentary about love and sex being the height of the product.

Morgan and Larkin date and agree to commit to a platonic marriage based on their intellectual common grounds, without sex. But Rose makes a near fatal mistake in the relationship: she falls in love with Larkin. She is shattered when Larkin won't make love to her after she's done her best to seduce him. So she returns home to her aging disgruntled mother (Lauren Bacall). Bacall has a key point in the story that only a mother could have impact enough to deliver. As always, the actor brings her point home brilliantly with brevity. Showing her daughter a kind of love she'd never felt from her before.

Brenda Vaccaro plays Streisand's best friend. Between Morgan's designing sister and Vaccaro they come up with a scheme that will alter both Larkin and Morgan's lives perhaps forever.

Bacall's, Bridge's, Streisand's and Vaccaro's performances are all stellar. It's a different stripe of love story.