Yes’s sing-songy dialogue wears thin early, distracts from action: review
June 24, 2005
(AP) – Despite its affirmative title, Sally Potter’s Yes is a maybe at
best.
The romantic drama starring Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian and Sam Neill
is meticulously constructed and gorgeously shot, just what you would
expect from the director of the delicate, sumptuous Virginia Woolf
adaptation Orlando.
Yet the movie’s quirks and conceits – mainly, the fact that dialogue
is delivered in sometimes subtle, sometimes sing-songy verse – quickly
wear thin and distract from what little action the movie
presents. What’s left beneath writer-director Potter’s parlour tricks
is a story fervently performed yet dramatically drab.
Though Potter has a painter’s eye for framing and composing her shots,
the characters feel distant, and their little tales of infidelity are
uninvolving.
Potter tries to use her main story, about an affair between an
Irish-American woman and a Middle Eastern man, as a parallel for Arab
relations with the Western world. Perhaps because of that, the lovers’
relationship often is forced and artificial, as though they’re
political puppets first, people second.
Or perhaps Potter simply was so caught up in her own poetry, both in
word and picture, that she failed to present her characters as living,
loving humans.
Many details of their lives are deliberately left vague, right down to
the main players’ names. Allen is simply known as “She,” a
Belfast-born, U.S.-raised scientist living a sham of a marriage in
London with her philandering husband (Neill), a politician.
At a banquet, “She” meets “He” (Abkarian), a Lebanese doctor who fled
Beirut and now works as a chef. Sparks fly, not so much on screen but
in theory; though Potter’s script demands that these two begin an
affair, the relationship unfolds with deep intimacy but little
passion.
Yes meanders about with great precision and not much point. She and He
sleep together, cuddling and cooing. She and her husband quarrel
bitterly. She has fitful encounters with family friends. He has a
dangerous encounter with his kitchen help. She and He lapse into
recrimination and separate, geography becoming the metaphor through
which the future of their relationship will be determined.
Dialogue is arranged largely in iambic pentameter, 10 syllables a
line.
Potter wisely told her actors not to flaunt it, focusing on the
meaning rather than the rhythm. That generally retains the naturalness
of their speech, though the rhymes at times are florid and awkward,
distracting from what the characters mean to say.
Delivered in such verse, Allen and Abkarian’s early pillow talk brings
real freshness to the hyperbole of romance, like lovers in a musical
unable to contain themselves and bursting into song.
Eventually, it just seems like a tired gimmick, while the sheer
density of the language often undermines the exchanges.
Likewise, Potter’s fixation on housekeepers and cleaners as witnesses
to the main players’ crises becomes a heavy-handed pretension. As She
and her husband’s housekeeper, Shirley Henderson serves as a windy
chorus speakingdirectly into the camera about what she sees, while
other mute cleaners hover elsewhere, putting a period on scenes with
cryptic glances straight into the lens.
It all feels empty, and in the end, Yes comes off like an elaborate
shell game. You’ve dutifully kept your eyes on the shell concealing
the ball, only to find magician Potter has palmed it.
Two stars out of four.
© The Canadian Press 2005