THE MIRROR HAS TWO FACES (36)

Directed by: Barbra Streisand

Starring: Barbra Streisand, Jeff Bridges, Lauren Bacall

The Pitch: A desperately single spinster accepts a colleague's proposal of marriage without sex.

Theo Sez: An enjoyable romantic comedy, aiming for the unforced literate tone of its Old Hollywood forebears (hence the clip from IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT) but foundering on the rock of its star's inexplicable obsession with her unconventional looks. It's somehow assumed that this is a film about physical beauty, about an ugly duckling who turns into a swan, when in fact the heroine is never established as particularly homely - perhaps, in Streisand's quasi-paranoid thinking, such explanation is deemed unnecessary - nor is there any indication that her reluctant lover is repelled by her physically, quite the opposite in fact (the focus is instead on his harebrained plan to do away with sex in general). It makes the film emotionally puzzling, not to say incoherent - unlike the 1958 French original, in which an ugly woman becomes a beautiful one (through plastic surgery), this heroine is faced with mental rather than physical obstacles to happiness, so her makeover is meaningless. Its point, of course, is that it gives her that shibboleth of modern psychobabble, Self-Esteem (without which true happiness is of course impossible) - which, like the hero's panic-stricken fear of sex, makes this a remarkably 90s movie; future generations will presumably write books on how mind-bogglingly mixed-up we were.