Yentl.

ANOTHER LONG-AWAITED, multimillion-dollar venture proves, contrariwise, to be totally despicable. Yentl, unsteadily based on I. B. Singer's colorful tale, is a project Barbra Streisand has been hatching for some 15 years; the result is a monstrous rubber pterodactyl, inflated with an egomania more monumental than Miss Streisand's beak. The Singer story is about a shtetl girl, Yentl, who, motherless from infancy, falls in love with her father's religious book-learning. When Papa too dies, she refuses to accept the Jewish order whereby only men can become scholars and theologians while somen must be wives and mothers. So she disguises herself as a young man, Anshel, becomes a Yeshiva student in another town, falls in love with her handsome fellow student Avigdor, and, when the latter is rejected as a suitor by the family of Hadass, his beloved, because of suicide in his family, marries Hadass herself at Avigdor's urging, so as to keep the girl in, as it were, their family.

Thus Yentl is really about the fantastic lengths to which love of learning and love of another being can drive a person, and the funn-sad results. In the story, after Yentl reveals her femaleness to Avigdor and her unhusbandliness to Hadass and her family, she goes off to yet another shtetl, into solitude and, presumably, the solace of books. But the problem with Streisand--especially when she is functioning as producer, co-writer, director, star, and only singer on the sound-track (nobody else is allowed one note)--is that her repertoire in love is as limited as her repertoire in acting: Though she can convey voracious love of self with revolting conviction, passionate love of books and of another being is categorically beyond her means.

IN THE MOVIE, co-scripted by Streisand and Jack Rosenthal, shtetl life is gussied up to the nth degree, as befits the setting of so precious a jewel as Barbra. These poor or better-off Jews live in Hollywood ranch-style modern, rather like the characters in a Forties or Fifties film located in or around Palm Springs; Barbra even gets to wear a pillbox-shaped skullcap worthy of Yves St. Laurent, while everyone else must make do with the conventional model. The camera is almost never off Barbra's face, though that is much the least photogenic object to cross its path, and when it reluctantly tears itself away, it does so only to document Yentl's point of view. And David Watkin, that marvelous cameraman, has clearly been instructed to shoot everything as if made of spun sugar and lit up by its private rainbow (Barbra's covenant with the Lord?), so that just looking at it will give you acute indigestion.

And I am not even talking of Streisand's performance, which is rather less bad as Anshel than, earlier, as Yentl. It seems that, even though she's a novice at it, Streisand is a better male impersonator than, despite years of practice, a female one. There is a scene that attains the ridiculous sublime: Barbra reveals to Many Patinkin that she is a woman; overcome, Avigdor proceeds to touch and gush about the beauty of Yentl's various parts--forehead, eyes, mouth, skin--carefully skirting an object as unmentionable as the name of God is to an Orthodox Jew. There's a moment's pause as his hand falters, and you think, "He's finally noticed IT!" But no, he goes on to eulogize some other outlying feature--the ears, perhaps.

On top of all this comes a score that's stultifyingly ponderous enough to knock out a herd of oxen. That always tawdry, indeed garish, composer, Michel Legrand, who has long since lost whatever pseudo-talent he had, has ground out sounds of exemplary vulgarity produced by what must be a two-hundred-piece orchestra, for which that utterly untalented Hollywood couple, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, have concocted lyrics of surpassing banality. Blared at us from the soundtrack while the action goes on around Barbra, they are meant to represent her stream of consciousness, and give rise to a new genre to be called inferior monologue.

The final sequence is an apotheosis. Dressed to kill on a shabby, emigrant-crowded boat to America, Yentl has obviously bought an entire deck for herself, where, unimpeded, she performs a number parlously close to "Don't Rain on My Parade." For this parade, rain would be too good.