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June 30, 2005 Thursday 3:43 PM EST

EW review

By Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly

[parts omitted]

‘Yes’

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

In Sally Potter’s “Yes,” an American research scientist meets a
Lebanese chef at a London dinner party. She’s an unhappy, pale beauty
and he’s a soulful, swarthy hunk, and the two fall upon each other
with ravenous desire.

She’s a scientist, lost in a sterile marriage (her husband is a
cheating British diplomat), and he’s a chef, lost in a country not
his own (at home he was a surgeon). She is played by Joan Allen,
radiantly, maturely sexy, and he is played by Armenian-Lebanese actor
Simon Abkarian, ditto.

The two speak in verse — iambic pentameter, to be precise, the
rhythmic beat that echoes that of hearts — even when chopping
parsley, making love, arguing about religion and culture and
geopolitics. And after an East-meets-West,
old-world-meets-new-imperialism quarrel (about religion, culture,
geopolitics), the two cry oui, oui, oui all the way home. Or rather
si, si, si: For reasons as unexplained as any in this flushed,
impetuous folly, reconciliation takes place in that lovers’ Eden
called Cuba.

Exotic, no? Potter, the writer-director of “Orlando” and “The Tango
Lesson,” has said she made “Yes” as an artistic response to 9/11 —
her own idiosyncratic affirmative, as it were, in the face of a
cataclysmic negative. And she sets herself such a high formal level
of difficulty — and achieves images of such sensual intensity —
that there is a fascination to be had merely in swooning along with
She and He.

Allen actually glows with arousal; Abkarian boasts black hair so
romance-novel photogenic that he’s excused from wearing a hairnet in
the restaurant kitchen. Parse the philosophy behind the spill of
words, though, and you’ll find intellectual jumble, junk. Better to
nod to “Yes” as a drowsing chant than take it seriously as a
statement of global concerns.

EW Grade: C+