Entertainment Weekly
July 8, 2005
YES;
Another sexy outing from the incandescent Joan Allen
Lisa Schwarzbaum
YES
Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian
R, 100 mins. (Sony Pictures Classics)
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. C+ –LS