Despite its title, The Mirror Has Two Faces reveals three interesting and intertwined personas. Barbra Streisandās character comes to realize much about love and relationships. Barbra Streisand, actor, has selected and plays a role that enables her to deal successfully with the omnipresent challenge of her powerful, big-target, off-screen star image. And incorporating homage to the screwball comedies of the ā30s and ā40s, which she has always loved, with her own brand of contemporary thoughtfulness, Barbra Streisand comes into her own as a director.

Although it is her co-star Jeff Bridgesā character in Mirror who says of love that it "feels like Iāve come home," it may well describe how many audience members who have followed Streisandās career will react to this film. Thirty-three years after breaking out of small clubs at age 20 and into Broadway, recording, and film history with one of the biggest and most distinctive voices of the century, Streisand has found in this project a combination mid-life stride as producer, director, and actor which should dispel any notion that she is primarily a loose-cannon ego with money and power cleaving desperately to former glory. With The Mirror Has Two Faces, Streisand hits another career high, and she does so wearing three hats well, cleverly exploiting her own alleged narcissism to score some points about self vs. public image.

Although her previous ventures in the triple role of producer, director, and actor ÷ The Prince of Tides and Yentl ÷ have their admirers, this new film is likely to win broader popularity, and for more reasons. It has its flaws, but The Mirror Has Two Faces is an overall success. And its success is a triumph of Streisandās canniness, intelligence, and hard-won understanding of the good uses of restraint. She hasnāt set out (1) to make a deeply philosophical movie or (2) make a movie calculated to soften her personal image ÷ described by detractors as a difficult egotist ÷ or (3) make a movie to showcase her directorial skill. But by working carefully, with intelligence and imagination, and within limits, she has managed to do all three. She has come up with a romantic comedy that also has some brain power. It is a formulaic, old-fashioned entertainment, layered with just enough depth and drama to satisfy. If at times the pacing wobbles or the arc of a scene in Richard LaGraveneseās script isnāt perfectly clean, The Mirror Has Two Faces is nonetheless an impressive balancing act.

The first thing Streisand gets right is her character. Rose Morgan is a professor of literature who is engaging in the classroom, a good-natured, humorous, intelligent woman in mid-life. Although Rose has recently been dumped by a man (Pierce Brosnan) who then married her beautiful, hard-edged sister (Mimi Rogers), we are not invited to perceive Rose as an ugly duckling academic. Streisand doesnāt overindicate that Rose isnāt "picture-pretty" or that she is unmarried; she lets the womanās genuinely attractive qualities come through.

Sheās likeable enough that weāre not surprised when she draws the attention of a good-looking but goofy mathematics prof ÷ played deftly by Bridges in one of the most challenging stretches of his recent career ÷ who is running from sex. A supreme rationalist, Gregory has always been a bit thrown by sexuality, and has never experienced a relationship in which a woman offered mutual respect and the life of the mind. Most frequently used as a distracted, intellectual doofus in a hunky sex-object body, he has determined to seek a relationship in which he will not succumb to the enslavements and disorder of romantic, sexual involvement.

The Mirror Has Two Faces seems intent on carrying the message that too many folks confuse romance and sex with grounds for marriage, that too few people weigh the absolute necessity for friendship, companionability, shared interests, and a true intimacy of souls. (Few mature adults might argue this, but it probably canāt be brought up too often.) But when Rose and Gregory decide to marry, the audience already knows enough to guess that their platonic agreement isnāt soundly based either. Itās implied that Rose has never had much opportunity of enjoying sexuality and, despite her intellectual acceptance of the marriage, canāt suppress wanting that dimension with Gregory; Gregory, on the other hand, has much to learn about his own avoidance, his history of women as sexy users and the fact that Rose is something altogether different.

The casting of Jeff Bridges is the second major ingredient Streisand has gotten exactly right. He handles with grace and energy the wide-ranging stylistic demands of the role of Gregory. From zany situational shtick to direct, complex emotion, Bridges builds a character that somehow keeps one foot believably kicking in light physical comedy and one firmly planted in deeper, dramatic character development. Itās difficult to think of another contemporary American screen actor who could have juggled the demanding variety of tone and color in this character and made it work.

The third successful element of Mirror is that Streisand has surrounded herself and Bridges with a brace of terrific supporting actors. Brosnan and Rogers play a pair of trivial, vapid, beautiful people with subtle comic finesse; Brenda Vaccaro is Roseās chubby sidekick; and in the most interesting role sheās had in years in a major film, Lauren Bacall is Roseās emotionally aloof mother. Another example of Streisandās not missing a trick in the deployment of her resources is a sequence of two quietly climactic scenes in which Rose and her mother confront together the meaning and perception of physical beauty and the undeniable human need for love. There can be little doubt that these scenes (the second of which is likely to turn up next spring as a clip for a Supporting Actress Oscar nod to Bacall) tap into the deep personal histories of these two unique performers.

Having debunked fairytale endings, Streisandās Mirror continues on its smart and merry way of having it all by ending with one. At its most shallow and insignificant, the film glosses over the serious issues it purports to explore ÷ the relation of sex to beauty, the cerebral to the emotions, the nature of love, physical beauty, respect, and marriage.

It tacitly undercuts much of its own interesting complexity, maturity, and substance by suggesting ÷ despite some dialogue that seeks to reassure us otherwise ÷ that, when all is said and done, there is no better answer than a complete makeover at Elizabeth Arden and hopping into bed with Jeff Bridges. But even if youāre not among the legions who might agree with that, youāre likely to feel several smiles and at least a couple of thoughts provoked by The Mirror Has Two Faces. ÷ Hadley Hury

In Secrets & Lies, Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays Hortense, a middle-class black woman who searches for her birth parents after the death of her mother. What she finds is something quite different from what sheās known. Her birth mother is a working-class white woman named Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), who is shocked to be discovered.

Written and directed by Mike Leigh, Secrets & Lies addresses not only Hortenseās search for identity but Cynthiaās lifetime of misery caused by her youthful indiscretions. By the time Hortense makes contact with her birth mother, Cynthia has backed herself in a corner. Her house is crumbling, her daughter hates her, and her sister-in-law condemns her as a failure. All of this makes Cynthia a sniveling mess.

Leigh guides his characters slowly ÷sometimes too slowly ÷ to the climax at a family barbecue, where Cynthia brings Hortense along as a work friend. Along the way, Leigh keenly demonstrates through careful dialogue and exasperated looks how secrets and petty misunderstandings have caused such a rent in the familyās relationship as to make any gathering a sure environment for tension.

In one scene, Hortense talks with a friend about her reasons for looking for her mother. The friend says that she wishes her mother had given her up for adoption. Hortense dismisses this as nonsense, noting that her mother gave her away. Later, though, when Hortense finally meets the family, you know that she canāt help but feel that sheās been lifted above the fray. Cynthiaās little brother Maurice (Timothy Spall), a successful special-occasions photographer, bears the brunt of the familyās trouble, and it shows on his ever-creased brow. His wife Monica (Phyllis Logan) makes up for her inability to have children by painstakingly decorating her house to look as characterless as a furniture showroom, only stopping to throw a few snipes about Cynthia or to keel over from menstrual cramps. Meanwhile, Cynthiaās daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) has declared war on her mother, showering her with insults and driving her crazy by disappearing and answering her questions only with grunts.

The crux of the film is presented in the moments interspersed throughout the film when Maurice is shooting his clients, who are there to record a wedding, a graduation, etc. He tells them they can smile if they want to or not. He never pushes ÷ he knows they have a history of their own. ÷ Susan Ellis

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