San Jose Mercury News, CA
July 1 2005
Going from bed to verse
IAMBIC PENTAMETER GIVES `YES’ FORM, BUT NOT SUBSTANCE
By A.O. Scott
The first thing to say about Sally Potter’s “Yes” is that it is
written in verse — rhymed iambic pentameter, to be precise. This
curious feature may not, however, be the first thing you notice about
the movie, given the cast’s impressive ability to make highly
artificial language sound like natural speech. The rhythms of the
dialogue are at once odd and familiar, and the meter gives the
picture a brisk momentum, making it feel like the expression of
single, sustained impulse. “Yes” is not just a movie, in other
words; it’s a poem.
A bad poem.
There is no denying Potter’s skill at versifying — or for that
matter, at composing clear, striking visual images — but her
intricate, measured lines amount to doggerel, not art. Her formal
ingenuity (also on display in “Orlando” and “The Man Who Cried”),
which it would be unkind to dismiss as mere pretension, is yoked to
ideas of almost staggering banality, and she sacrifices the
seriousness of a group of superb actors on the altar of her own
intellectual vanity.
Her ambitions could hardly be larger — this wants to be a movie
about love, hate, class, religion, ethnicity, science and the
fractious state of the modern world. But rather than expanding our
sense of what it all means, Potter shrinks it down to a single
syllable. Tempting as it is to contradict her yes with a simple no,
other responses also come to mind. And? So? What?
The two main characters are themselves monosyllabic generalities: an
adulterous couple known only as He and She. He is a Lebanese refugee
living in London, a surgeon in his home country and a restaurant cook
in his city of exile. She is an American scientist who spent her
childhood in Northern Ireland and who now endures a cold marriage
with a stuffy British diplomat.
He (the cook) is played by gifted Armenian-Lebanese actor Simon
Abkarian, whose work has mainly been in French movies and on the
Paris stage. She is the incomparable Joan Allen, whose bearing grows
at once more supple and more regal with every film. Sam Neill, as the
husband, joins the list of eminent actors (Anthony Hopkins and Kevin
Kline are at the top) who have portrayed Allen’s worse half, and he
gallantly plays along in a game that is rigged against him from the
start. Allen suffers not just nobly, but intelligently, and briskly
pockets the audience’s sympathy and its admiration.
Sympathy is in order primarily for the valiant actors, who do their
best to give subtle, vivid, human performances, only to find
themselves banging against the bars of the allegorical cage Potter
has built for them. He and She, after batting eyes and exchanging
pleasantries at a stuffy formal dinner, begin a love affair that
before long becomes a geopolitical crisis in microcosm. The
differences between them — of religion, culture and circumstance —
drive them apart, as all the complex hatreds of the modern world
press down on their simple desire to be in love.
Or so Potter would have us believe. But really, the main obstacle
facing them is the director’s dogmatic belief that human beings exist
mainly, if not solely, as accretions of identity. “Yes,” a movie
that proudly (if lazily) flies the flag of tolerance and
cosmopolitanism, consists of nothing but stereotypes.
He is a figure out of a threadbare Orientalist carpet: florid of
speech, emotionally volatile, oscillating wildly between pride and
self-pity. She is the embodiment of chilly Western rationality, and
the twain can only meet in bed. Or on the beach in Cuba, which turns
out to be the only place in the world free from the frigid
materialism of the developed world and the blood hatreds of the
Middle East.
The secondary characters are also cartoonishly drawn, from the
thin-lipped, deceiving husband to the best friend whose motherly
sentimentality is a challenge to the heroine’s childless reserve. The
only figure capable of any mischief or surprise, or any humor, is a
house cleaner (Shirley Henderson) who functions as tour guide, Greek
chorus and voice of the otherwise silent working class.
Meanwhile, He and She, having recoiled from their initial sexual
bliss, start arguing politics. Since She spent part of her childhood
in Belfast, she is excused from bearing a full measure of imperialist
guilt. Like her lover, she can claim a homeland riven by religious
hatred. But his sympathy wears thin after a confrontation with his
racist co-worker, and He assails She with rhetoric about honor and
shame, blood and oil, and the poverty of Western civilization, which
apparently consists of “Elvis and Eminem and Warhol’s Art.”
“I have read the Bible — have you read the Quran?” He demands.
“The things that they have done have not been in my name,” She
says, speaking not of Elvis or Warhol but of the unnameable
Voldemorts in the American government. “I feel no pride. I feel a
deepening shame.”
The shame is that this sentiment has the psychological weight and
ideological nuance of a bumper sticker, which is pretty much what
“Yes” amounts to.
Potter has made much of the fact that she began writing the
screenplay shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, but her film is
strikingly the work of somebody whose view of the world has not been
significantly altered by that event or any other recent catastrophe.
For all her intellectual posing, Potter does not want you to think,
but rather to nod your head in agreement. Please.`Yes’
* 1/2
Rated: R (sexual content, profanity)
Cast: Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, Sam Neill, Shirley Henderson
Writer-director: Sally Potter
Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes