Yes **** (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Sally Potter With Simon Abkarian, Joan Allen, Shirley Henderson, Sam Neill, Wil Johnson, Gary Lewis, Raymond Waring, and Stephanie Leonidas
Yes is a post-9/11 love story, set chiefly in London, about a passionate adulterous affair between an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen), who’s unhappily married to an English politician, and a somewhat younger Lebanese cook (Simon Abkarian), who’s unmarried and used to work as a surgeon in Beirut. All the dialogue, which Potter wrote, is in rhyming iambic pentameter, ten syllables to a line, apart from a few direct declarations with eight syllables. Far from a gimmick, this is the ideal way to convey Potter’s poetic intelligence and her feelings about the contemporary world. Moreover, the dialogue is delivered with such skill by the actors that it remains expressive without ever seeming mannered or show-offy.
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Potter isn’t dealing with a trauma buried in the past but one that’s ongoing, though she too uses spatial and cultural removes. The hero isn’t Afghan or Iraqi but Lebanese (and, reversing standard procedure, he’s more sexually objectified and glamorized than the heroine), she’s an American born in Ireland and living in England, and the film’s set in London, Beirut, and Havana, not Kabul or Baghdad. Potter, who’s a trained musician, is using her own poetic language, cuts, camera movements, canted angles, periodically slurred action, and other visual strategies to create emotional gateways into intellectual concerns. Differences in class parallel and overlap differences in culture, but her rhyming lines are clarifying, not vilifying. Consider these lines from three different parts of the film:
