Rocky Mountain News, CO
July 8 2005

When worlds collide
Romance crosses cultures in erotically charged drama ‘Yes’

By Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News
July 8, 2005

Poetry and movies don’t make the best of bedfellows. So when a
director decides that characters should speak in verse as part of an
allegorical romance about faltering relations between the Arabs and
Westerners, it sounds as if a literary gun has been loaded and
pointed directly at our heads.

And when that director is Sally Potter (Orlando, The Tango Lesson),
one reasonably can worry about whether the resultant movie will feel
slightly arid. Potter has a fondness for cinema that’s all of a piece
but is somewhat abstract, style-driven work in which the style isn’t
always enough.

In Potter’s new movie, Yes, the characters do speak in verse, but
what easily could have been a pretentious exercise develops into a
rich display of eroticism.

Much of the credit belongs to the actors (notably Joan Allen and
Simon Abkarian), who downplay the poetry, delivering Potter’s
iambic-pentameter dialogue in the rhythms of ordinary speech. At the
same time, the poetry creates an atmosphere in which the stakes of
each conversation seem slightly heightened.

Potter, who says she began writing just after Sept. 11, has decided
to explore the subject of cultural rift in an erotically charged
movie in which two very different characters become romantically
involved. And although Potter doesn’t entirely win her bet, she must
be credited for jumping into difficult thickets, bringing her probing
movie to a surprisingly optimistic conclusion.

Seen earlier this year in the comedy The Upside of Anger, Allen plays
a scientist whose marriage to a diplomat (Sam Neill) has gone stale.
At a dinner party, she meets a chef (Abkarian) from an unnamed Middle
Eastern country. He immediately begins to woo her.

Allen is one of the few actresses who combine imposing intelligence
with eroticism, and she contrasts well with Abkarian, an Armenian
actor from Lebanon who brings charm and emerging rue to the role of
an Arab physician forced to work as a chef in London.

Neill has a wonderful air-guitar-playing moment that allows us to
peek behind his character’s pinstriped facade, but for the most part
Yes remains a two-character dance in which the steps are determined
by chemical attraction and cultural conflict.

When the workers in Abkarian’s restaurant make racist remarks, he
turns a single incident into an indictment of an entire culture,
spreading his venom to Allen’s character. He’s pushed to an extreme
that probably doesn’t represent his deepest beliefs, which is one of
the worst consequences of prejudice: It can deprive people of choice.

Allen’s character (called “She” in the screenplay) tries to balance
her need for sexual and romantic excitement with a scientific bent
that mistrusts both. Abkarian increasingly finds himself stuck in the
fissure between the demands of tradition and the need for individual
expression.

Potter also provides perspective on her characters by focusing on the
maids who serve as the movie’s chorus. One (Shirley Henderson) brings
a down-to-earth skepticism to the proceedings.

If you’re looking for a shattering conclusion about the possibility
of bridging cultural gaps, you’d do well to look elsewhere. Despite
its trappings (poetry, ideas and a Philip Glass score), Yes is less a
formal triumph than a movie that’s redeemed by the one thing movies
express better than ideas: a delicate yet compelling eroticism.

For a variety of reasons that Potter’s screenplay makes clear, two
people turn each other on. The rest, as they say, is struggle and
commentary.