Santa Cruz Sentinel, CA
July 22 2005

Say ‘Yes’ to this indie film
By CATHERINE GRAHAM
SENTINEL CORRESPONDENT

Just as one person’s fine wine is another’s gutter water, “Yes”
might be one person’s thought-provoking work of art but another’s
load of pretentious, er, excrement.

I found it sexy and intelligent, and was always interested in finding
out what would happen next. Yet I can understand why someone else
would really hate it.

“Yes” is the sort of risky, experimental film that might be best
exhibited in an art gallery or museum. Just as entering an opera house
sets up expectations of the kind of musical experience we will have,
a fine arts setting would prepare us to meet the intellectual and
emotional challenge of “Yes.”

Filmed in Super 16 with video inserts, the visual style is often
jarring, with jump cuts, slo-mo and intense close ups in which the
actor looks directly into the camera.

Writer-director Sally Potter is a dancer, choreographer, performance
artist and musical composer. Her film adaptation of Virginia Woolfe’s
“Orlando” (1993) – the story of someone who lives 400 years, first as
a man, later as a woman – established her as the sort of artist who
appeals most to those whose taste in movies might be best described
as offbeat.

Potter continues in this un-Hollywood mode in “Yes,” bringing her
entire resume to bear. She composes individual shots as carefully
as a painter would a still life; when the camera moves, it is with
choreographed, ballet-like precision.

In the script written by Potter, the characters speak in rhymed
iambic pentameter. This curious feature works better at some points
in the film than in others, most successfully with The Cleaning Woman
(sharply portrayed by Shirley Henderson), who serves as the film’s
narrator/Greek chorus.

None of the characters have names. She (the magnificent Joan Allen)
is a wealthy, respected scientist mired in an unhappy marriage to
The Diplomat (Sam Neill, suitably thin-lipped and aloof). He (gifted
Lebanese-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian) works as a humble cook,
though in his native Lebanon was a respected surgeon.

Like in a Douglas Sirk women’s weepie of the 1950s, the upper crust
woman goes for the man of the lesser social stature. Their sex earns
a well-deserved R rating, with conventional gender roles reversed;
the male is the exotic object of desire and the more passive,
emotionally-invested partner.

Within the framework of this melodramatic love story, Potter addresses
themes as varied as racism, class consciousness, love, hate and the
fractious state of the modern world.

Cell phones loom large in expressing the disconcerting aspects of
life in this technological age. In one key scene, She telephones He,
expecting him to be across town (in this case, London) – after all,
last time she used that number he was at home.

But when he answers, he informs her he’s in Beirut. The distance
between her expectation of his physical whereabouts and where he is
really is a perfect metaphor for their emotional disconnect.

The performance artist Laurie Anderson has a bit she calls “difficult
listening music.” By the same, humorous, tongue-in-cheek concept,
“Yes” is a difficult viewing film. It’s not a summer blockbuster
aimed at the teenage male demographic. It’s an adult movie in the
best sense of the word adult, with images and ideas that may haunt
you for days afterward.

Contact Catherine Graham at svreeken@santacruzsentinel.com.

If You Go

WHAT: ‘Yes.’

RATING: R: For language, sexual content.

WHERE: The Nickelodeon, 426-7500.

LENGTH: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

VERDICT: A-.