Indie Wire
June 21 2005
Man, Verse, Woman: Sally Potter’s “Yes”
by Jeannette Catsoulis with responses by James Crawford and Michael
Joshua Rowin
Sam Abkarian as “He” and Joan Allen as “She” in Sally Potter’s “Yes.”
Photo by Nicola Dove, provided by Sony Pictures Classics.
[ indieWIRE’s weekly reviews are written by critics from Reverse
Shot. ]
A meeting of soulmates secreted deep inside an attraction of
opposites, Sally Potter’s “Yes” is also a supremely sensitive
observation of racism, classism, imperialism, and fundamentalism. And
if that sounds like a lot of ‘isms,’ they’re only the tip of Potter’s
narrative iceberg, which also encompasses aging, alienation, and the
precarious relationship between identity and sexual power. Yet,
amazingly for a film so teeming with ideas, “Yes” unspools inclean,
lucid scenes of near-spartan simplicity-proving definitively that
complexity of message need not require an equivalence of execution.
Conceived in response to the post-9/11 treatment of those of Middle
Eastern descent, Yes begins in London and follows the love affair of
two exiles — one actual, one figurative — known simply as He (Simon
Abkarian) and She (Joan Allen). He is a Lebanese surgeon who has fled
Beirut and now works unhappily as a hotel chef; She is an
Irish-American biologist trapped in an icy marriage to a faithless
English politician (Sam Neill). “Each cell knows its destiny,” she
muses enviously, hovering over a petri dish. But it will take almost
the length of the movie before she surrenders to her own.
Until that point, “Yes” is immersed in the desperate passion of two
people grasping the lifeline of erotic love as a placebo for much
deeper emotional needs, and it’s in this section of the film that
Potter’s flair for movement fully surfaces. Her absolute faith in the
expressiveness of the physical body infects the normally cool Allen
with a libidinous grace, making her scenes with Abkarian wickedly
earthy (most notably during a bout of heated restaurant foreplay).
For his part, the sensual Abkarian-best known to American audiences
as the Armenian painter Arshile Gorky in Atom Egoyan’s “Ararat” — is
the perfectfoil for Allen’s pale elegance.
While Potter’s eloquent script highlights the sexual charge of racial
and religious difference, production designer Carlos Conti’s
meticulous sets emphasize their emotional and temperamental
dissimilarities. She lives and works in white, sterile surroundings,
all glass and metal and reflective surfaces; His workplace is noisy,
steamy, and chaotic, his home a cave of spicy color and womb-like
comfort. Accenting the illicitness of the affair, Potter spies on the
couple via surveillance camera, their conversation mute. A stroll in
the park is furtively documented by a camera stalking them from the
cover of trees and shrubbery. Russian cinematographer Alexei Rodionov
(who also shot Potter’s “Orlando”) evokes the fragility of the
relationship with an impressive array of techniques, often tilting
the frame beyond stability. Every time these two are together, in
fact, the film swoons with an undercurrent of uncertainty.
Always a suggestive visualist, Potter (like fellow Brits John Boorman
and Michael Winterbottom) is also fascinated by language. “Yes “is
written almost entirely in iambic pentameter (10 syllables to a
line), delivered so fluidly and unaffectedly audiences may not even
notice. Potter admits to being influenced by her background as a
lyricist and composing the script as if she were writing a song. Her
actors were instructed to ignore the verse and concentrate on
meaning, and the result is a potent, rhythmic dialogue that invests
key scenes with near-operatic power. Most crucial of these is an
argument staged in the echoing anonymity of a parking garage, which
serves as the film’s turning point. He has begun to rebel against the
secrecy of the relationship, and his pride has made him long for the
familiar sexual dynamics of his homeland. “Love distracts us,” He
complains, as the appeal of the exotic transforms into
claustrophobia. “I have remembered who I am.”
Easing the intensity is the delightful Shirley Henderson, playing a
philosophical maid who’s fond of delivering humorously pungent,
direct-to-camera soliloquies on the ubiquity of dirt and what it
reveals about us. Functioning on one level as Greek chorus (“They
leave each other notes, but rarely speak,” she whispers as She and
her husband move silently behind her), the character also symbolizes
the tide of service people-usually ethnic, always invisible-who swirl
around us. Throughout, “Yes” portrays life from the particular to the
universal, from duelling organisms in a petri dish (and sloughed
cells on a bedsheet) to the enormity of war itself.
Moving from London to Belfast to Beirut to Havana, “Yes” is an
ambitious and lyrical argument for tolerance and self-awareness.
Rarely has a cinematic love affair benefited from such insight and
intelligence; but ultimately we shouldn’t be surprised that the
first- ever recipient of the Satyajit Ray Award — for the director
with the most “uncompromised aesthetic vision” — continues to prove
those judges right.
[ Jeannette Catsoulis is a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot who
has also written for the Independent, DC One Magazine, and regularly
writes for the New York Times. ]
Sam Neill and Joan Allen in “Yes.” Photo by Nicola Dove, provided by
Sony Pictures Classics.
Take 2
By James Crawford
The best modern interpretations of Elizabethan theater run roughshod
over meter, obliterating it to fit dramatic exigency. Sally Potter,
by contrast, forces her actors in “Yes” to obey strict Shakespearean
rhythm and couplet rhyme, meticulously penned in rhyming iambic
pentameter, scuttling much of the tension. When Joan Allen’s and Sam
Neill’s strained yet acutely decorous marriage finally comes to the
boiling point, I found myself wanting for the pregnant pauses and
strained silences indicative of a relationship on the rocks. Because
the actors are corseted into the metronomically regimented stress and
release of iambic feet, the scene fizzles-and Allen’s teetering-on-
hysterical tirade falls embarrassingly flat. As one lover says to
another, “conversation” may be “like an aphrodisiac/Because it flowed
like a nectar or a juice,” but in the unending, perpetual tumble of
words and images, shouted epithets lack punch, and emotional states
struggle to find resonance.
Despite any emotional failings, Potter’s dialogue is undeniably
beautiful, it allows her to explore Big Ideas like death, love, and
fidelity, so attuned are our ears to the confluence of sophisticated
themes and finely-worded poetry. Yet Potter’s lofty rhetoric cannot
hide the fact that her approach to these subjects is awfully
schematic. The break-up between Allen’s Irish-American “She” and
Simon Abkarian’s Lebanese “He” is deployed as an excuse to sermonize
at length on the antipathies between East and West (read: Christian
and Muslim ideology); her and Neill’s disintegrating marriage is
portrayed through a set of awkward (and unnecessary) canted angles;
the random intrusion of a terminally ill aunt functions as a weak
segue so that Potter can muse on the nature of mortality (though her
deathbed epic poem it is positively riveting). And most maddeningly
of all, a dryly comic book by Shirley Henderson — a wise-fool
cleaning lady delivering her morals to the audience in direct address
— is squandered because it’s only loosely connected to the rest of
the drama.
Oftentimes, critics decry the fact that so much money is funnelled
into computerized special effects, to the detriment of story, plot,
and everything else. So much, we proclaim, could be ameliorated by
putting more effort into the words being said. Sally Potter’s cross-
cultural sept-à-cinq affaire, just might disprove that claim; the
script is paramount, while everything else-directing, narrative
suspense, and cinematography — falls by the wayside.
[ James Crawford is a frequent contributor to Reverse Shot. ]
Take 3
By Michael Joshua Rowin
Sam Abkarian and Joan Allen in Sally Potter’s “Yes.” Photo by Nicola
Dove, provided by Sony Pictures Classics.
Thankfully, Sally Potter’s original screenplay for “Yes” is available
in paperback, for I can think of no other recent film that has made
me want to re-experience its dialogue, in this case written in the
form of a poetic iambic pentameter that never becomes contrived or
showy. The classical makes a surprisingly fitting vessel for the
modern as characters’ interior monologues, asides, direct addresses,
rambling confessions, frustrated accusations, and deeply felt
pronunciations try to make sense of a very confusing, divisive
post-9/11 reality. Unfortunately, like the other few cinematic
responses to 9/11 (most notably “I Heart Huckabees”), “Yes” fails to
be a complete success by trying to say a little about everything-it’s
a shame to watch certain issues, like Western society’s obsession
with youth and bodily perfection, brought up only to be relegated to
the back-burner. Nonetheless, Joan Allen and Simon Abkarian’s
conversations on science, love, religion, and the cultural barriers
that complicated and fuel their affair-executed in Potter’s
well-crafted, witty pentameter-are the heart of a film that is at its
best when working through language to express its limits
(miscommunication, anger) and epiphanies (communication, love).
Beyond the verbal, however, “Yes”‘s errors are a bit disconcerting.
How could the same director who made the sumptuous “Orlando” allow
her latest project to look so shoddy? Various scenes shot with a low
shutter-speed give the film the look of a cheap music video trying to
be flashy. Then there’s the rushed, seize-the-day/love-conquers-all
ending, a disappointing capper for a film that deserves a more
complex and thoughtful conclusion. These would be taken for rookie
mistakes if Potter wasn’t so damn masterful in other areas. Anyway,
aren’t mistakes part of art? The ubiquitous house-cleaner/chorus of
the film ponders life’s imperfections: “For, everything you do or say
is there, forever. It leaves evidence.” Even with flaws, “Yes” is art
as evidence: evidence of Potter’s talent and courage.
[ Michael Joshua Rowin is a staff writer at Reverse Shot. He has
written for the Independent, Film Comment, and runs the blog Hopeless
Abandon. ]