Film director Sally Potter likes to invent challenges for herself. Her 1993 movie Orlando was about a character who lives for four centuries, half of them as a man, half as a woman. And her latest film, Yes, is a modern day love story written entirely in verse. Bob Mondello says he sees both reason and rhyme in her method.
She is Irish-American, elegant, and married unhappily. He is Middle-Eastern, a chef who sees her looking miserable in a banquet he has helped cater. He asks if she is OK, and he is so quietly attentive that she can't stop thinking about him. Soon she is doing more than just thinking, walking with him and talking in a manner that's far more intimate than anything she shares with her husband.
You think you can penetrate the mind of God.
I do not know God has a mind doing this, so I don't ...
Who can agree?
So just disagree.
I say the way they talk is intimate; it's also intensely stylized. Director Sally Potter is among other things a songwriter. So scripting a whole movie in iambic pentameter comes more naturally to her than it might to other filmmakers. It is still quite a trick though as if making a film about lovers separated by class, race, religion, and politics weren't complicated enough, happily the poetry does what poetry is supposed to do: it lends an epic, heightened quality to the conversations. If you listen, you can hear the rhymes, but they don't get in the way of what's being said.
How do you come to this? You are confusing me with them. Look, I'm not just an American, I'm Irish too.
So what? You all have roots somewhere, but have forgotten, that, you are anything but powerful and be boss. You'll hear our children's screams but feel no loss because they are not yours.
That is unfair. The things that they have done, have not been in my name. I don't feel pride, I feel a deepening shame.
I've always been a sucker for eccentric narrative devices because they make an audience work a little , ask me to puzzle something out and I feel much more engaged than I do when everything is handed to me conventionally. Not every one feels that way obviously, particularly in the summer. But even if you regard the verse and subject matter in Yes as a little "out" there, it will be hard not to be bowled over by the performances. Joan Allen is just terrific, icy at first, than meltingly human. And Simon Abkarian is doing nicely shaded work as the Lebanese surgeon-turned chef so conflicted by his attraction to her. Sally Potter has been dealing not just with a love affair, but also with the kind of issues that clutter up real life: elderly relatives who die inconveniently; children caught up in marital wars. All that complication counts in my mind as a bonus, so does the fact that Yes arrives in the middle of Hollywood's silly season, which makes it a lot easier to say, "yes", too. I'm Bob Mondello.
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