Daily Variety
September 16, 2004, Thursday
Yes
SCOTT FOUNDAS
A GreeneStreet Films and U.K. Film Council presentation of an
Adventure Pictures production in association with Studio Fierberg.
Produced by Christopher Sheppard, Andrew Fierberg. Executive
producers, John Penotti, Paul Trijbits, Fisher Stevens, Cedric
Jeanson.
Directed, written by Sally Potter. Camera (Eclair color, Super 16mm),
Alexei Rodionov; editor, Daniel Goddard; music, Potter; production
designer, Carlos Conti; art director, Claire Spooner; costume
designer, Jacqueline Durran; sound (Dolby Digital), Jean-Paul Mugel;
supervising sound editor, Vincent Tulli; associate producers, Lucie
Wenigerova, Diane Gelon; casting, Irene Lamb. Reviewed at Telluride
Film Festival, Sept. 5, 2004. (Also in Toronto Film Festival —
Special Presentations.) Running time: 99 MIN.
She …. Joan Allen
He …. Simon Abkarian
Anthony …. Sam Neill
Cleaner …. Shirley Henderson
Aunt …. Sheila Hancock
Kate …. Samantha Bond
Grace …. Stephanie Leonidas
Billy …. Gary Lewis
Virgil …. Wil Johnson
Whizzer …. Raymond Waring
Bursting with heavy-handed postulations about everything from global
terrorism to the ethos of dust particles, Sally Potter’s “Yes” is a
deeply idiosyncratic essay film made under the signs of Derek Jarman,
Peter Greenaway and playwright Tony Kushner, but not nearly up to the
level of those artists’ best work. Staring Joan Allen as an
Irish-American scientist who enters into an affair with a Lebanese
cook, pic ultimately has nothing of any real depth or profundity to
say, but a thousand self-consciously complex ways of saying it. Sure
to have its partisans, as it did in Telluride, pic is the type of
purely intellectual construct that, even when it works, inspires most
audiences to say “No.”
Arriving on the heels of Potter’s terminally silly Johnny Depp
starrer “The Man Who Cried” and the solipsistic “The Tango Lesson,”
“Yes” serves as further indication that Potter’s striking 1992
feature, “Orlando,” may have been a fluke.
After opening with an amusing if showy monologue delivered directly
to camera by chameleonic Scottish actress Shirley Henderson (playing
a housemaid), “Yes” switches its focus to a molecular biologist
(Allen) and her politico husband (Sam Neill), trapped in a busted-up
marriage.
At a dinner party, Allen (whose character is unnamed in the film and
referred to in press notes only as “She”) catches the eye of the cook
(Armenian thesp Simon Abkarian, fittingly known only as “He”). She
flirts with him a bit and leaves him with her phone number. After
returning from an international conference, she calls him up and an
affair begins.
By this point, it’s already obvious that “Yes” is no ordinary tale of
adultery. Not only have the characters not been assigned names, but
when they open their mouths, dialogue tends to emerge as rhyming
couplets — often quite bad ones. (Example: “Call me whore. I’ll ask
for more.”) On those occasions when the dialogue takes a momentary
respite, viewers are made privy to the characters’ innermost
thoughts, presented as rambling voiceovers in the fashion Wim Wenders
employed (to much stronger effect) in “Wings of Desire.”
Pic is built around a series of encounters between He and She,
including one particularly silly public display of sexual attraction
that feels like an outtake from Jane Campion’s “In the Cut.” However,
viewers never learn more than the most basic information about who
these people are or what drives them — a strategy that might have
worked better if the film’s theoretical ideas were themselves more
interesting.
Clearly, as in Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul,” Potter intends her
characters to register less in a specific sense than as archetypical
sides of a timely geopolitical divide — the compassionate, yet
inevitably imperialistic Westerner trying, yet failing to understand
the psychologically and emotionally oppressed Middle Easterner. But
unlike Kushner — or, for that matter, Jean-Luc Godard, in the
recent “Our Music” — Potter never moves past the surface of that
cliche notion.
While an assortment of other narrative tangents present themselves
— She’s guilt-riddled relationship with elderly Irish aunt (Sheila
Hancock); He’s tense dealings with the other members of the kitchen
staff — “Yes” only becomes increasingly tedious as it progresses.
And though Allen and Abkarian (who made a big impression as the lead
in Michel Deville’s “Almost Peaceful” in 2002) are powerful actors,
both are finally at a loss in their efforts to make something
meaningful out of the material, or at least something closer to a
movie than a doctoral thesis.
Shot in Super 16mm by Alexei Rodionov, pic has a deliberately grainy,
slightly overexposed texture, which Potter then transfigures through
an endless succession of dissolves, video-shot inserts, slow-motion
effects and other manipulations that seem designed (as in the worst
of Greenaway) to keep auds from noticing how empty pic really is.
Soundtrack is a similarly undigested overload of recycled pieces by
Tom Waits, Philip Glass and Kronos Quartet, plus original
compositions by Potter herself.
Note: Originally ran in the September 15, 2004 Gotham edition.