been hefting over the breakfast table. ‘Oooh, can I borrow it, Jen?’ said Marcus's other sister, Harriet.
Next morning Marcus flew me back to London himself, in his yellow two-seater aeroplane which he kept at the BBC flying club at Denham.
What is love? Let's ask Barbra Streisand.
It's like going to the movies, and we see the lovers on screen kiss, and the music swells and we buy it, right? So when my date takes me home and kisses me … (This is The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) and she's playing a professor of English at Columbia University who is adored by her students but, being plain, can't attract a man of note, although in about fifteen minutes she'll be approached by a maths professor played by Jeff Bridges who, cynical about long-term love, will suggest they marry purely for companionship. Bridges has come to spy on her, here in a student-crammed lecture hall the size of the Coliseum. Crammed with more than students, actually: there are people standing at the back, suggesting that perhaps even the janitors, or tutors from other disciplines, are gatecrashing Streisand's Nurembergian weekly address.) Barbra, in black dungarees and big specs, continues – and if I don't hear the Philharmonic in my head I dump him, right? From the students, appreciative, democratic laughter. It's the one lecture they've been looking forward to all week, and note-taking has been superseded by the desire simply to drink this all in. Now the question is, why do we buy it? Cut to the leonine Bridges, whose gravitas suggests that this is truly an exceptional college lecture and he is responding to it as one should to a serious contribution to the social sciences. Unfortunately his pager goes off, causing a rapt black student to look daggers at him, and he is forced, reluctantly, to drag himself away, looking perplexed yet intrigued. Had I reviewed The Mirror Has Two Faces, I might have been tempted to write something like: Jeff Bridges looks as if he wishes he were elsewhere. It's a classic reviewer's white lie, designed to let a favourite actor off the hook. Can you really imagine it: ‘Jeff! Can you please concentrate?’ Yet it appears in reviews all the time. Here's one, from a review of Chicken Tikka Massala, a ‘British Asian comedy’, in The Times a while back (May 2005). The reviewer, Wendy Ide, wishes that she'd been somewhere else rather than watching the movie, and ‘from the bloodless crushed look on Chris Bisson's face, I'd say he feels the same way’. Can it really be the case? It's a kindness. But in The Mirror Has Two Faces, I submit, we have a genuine once-in-a-lifetime example. No beautiful teen asked to fall for Woody Allen could ever have looked so stunned and reluctant and nauseated as Jeff does looking at Barbra Streisand. Rent the DVD and if you spool to the final credit sequence where Streisand and Bridges kiss and dance on the street, you'll notice that Bridges suddenly makes a break for it and runs to a taxi – and even though Barbra drags him back for another clinch, it unmistakably looks like the great Bridges has miscalculated by a mere twenty seconds how much time he must spend sentenced to this mishagas and is trying to get the hell off the set of what, to extend this digression, I further submit, is the worst film of all time, worse even than Peter's Friends or Maybe Baby. Worse even, possibly, than The Godfather Part III. A little charge goes off in reviewers' heads when it becomes apparent that such a possibility is in the offing. I have sat through screenings of Battlefield Earth, The Brylcreem Boys and Sex Lives of the Potato Men, and felt the electricity in the room, the silent commencement of an unspoken inter-critic competition to write the most freakishly abusive response. It's a perk of the job. And this really is the worst scene in the worst film ever made. We buy it because whether it's a myth or a manipulation, let's face it, we all want to fall in love, right? Cut to student with a red rinse, solemnly nodding. The blond guy in front of her looks a little confused, not because he can't follow, but because of the intellectual head-storm Barbra has whipped up in his cortex. Why? (Streisand's accent is becoming increasingly twangily Brooklynite.) Because the experience makes us feel completely alive! Where every sense is heightened! Every emotion is magnified! Our everyday reality is shattered and we are flung into the heavens! It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon, but that doesn't diminish its value. Because these are memories we will treasure for the rest of our lives. (Or resent, of course. Or possibly be tortured by.) She pauses, and takes off her spectacles, enjoying a well-earned breather while the camera moves towards her, triggering an unusual effect: the closer we get to Barbra, the less visible she becomes, so smudged and blurred and vaselined is the film texture. I read an article a while ago – she flicks her hair from above her left eye with an un-academically long and manicured fingernail, and one wonders momentarily if those nails were ever the subject of battles at executive level before wearily realising that Streisand is both director and a producer – that said when we fall in love we hear Puccini in our heads. (God, Puccini ? What kind of article was this? Not Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books, surely?) I love that. Balding mature student with moustache and cricket jumper raises a fist in salute and silently mouths the word yes like a tennis player who has just aced a volley. I think it's because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and romantic love. Shot of a transfixed bank of female students in polo necks and tweed jackets, almost tearful, as if they were watching David Helfgott swing through the Rach II. So, the final question is – why do people want to fall in love when it has such a short shelf life and can be devastatingly painful? Stacey? She points to a female stooge in a lumberjack shirt who offers: ‘It leads to propagation of the species?’ Ray? ‘Because psychologically we need to connect with somebody?’ Barbra cedes Ray's theory with a nod, but points to a third student – Cath? And suddenly it dawns on us that this woman knows every single one of her students by name. Cath stands up to put her full weight behind her answer – Is it because we're culturally preconditioned? The camera pans to Barbra, who smiles. (One imagines that the Reverend Gary Jones gave the same smile to his doomed acolytes minutes before the Jonestown Massacre.) Awawall good answers, but way too intellectual for me. There's a near-hysterical buzz in the room, and the viewer is already anticipatorily cringing at the by now completely inevitable bathetic definition that Barbra is unswervingly heading towards, like the Titanic towards its iceberg. I think because, as some of you already may know, while it does last – again, the smile, and one's sinking spirits now register the absolute certainty of an incipient deflationary profanity (a scientific curiosity: studies among both rats and humans have shown that if you stab somebody at this point in the film then they will actually pull the blade into them) – it feels FUCKING great! The room erupts into wild applause. Joseph Fiennes has just pulled off Romeo and Juliet. Cuba Gooding Jnr has just followed his touchdown with an amazing little dance. Liam Neeson has just won the Second World War. And Barbra raises a thumb up to the crowd and shouts Thank you! Thank you!
She's right about one thing of course, but it doesn't feel like Puccini.
To me it felt more like this:
Jeremy Irons says I've been waiting for you and Patricia Hodge says What do you mean? They're in a bedroom upstairs in a smart house; music is thudding below. I knew you'd come he says, and she says I've just come in to comb my hair. He says I knew you'd have to comb your hair. I knew you'd have to get away from the party.
He's drunk but he looks like he means it. She laughs – he's her husband's best friend and there is absolutely nothing whatsoever about her which suggests that flirtation or infidelity has ever crossed her mind. So when she asks Aren't you enjoying the party? and walks amusedly to the dressing table to pick up her hairbrush, she is just humouring an old friend, no more, no less. He just comes out with it. You're beautiful. Listen. I've been watching you all night. I