Customer Reviews

Yes

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I highly recommend the movie Yes.
I saw it just today and I confess,
That having had today four teeth removed
I spent the day with films and never moved.
Of all the shows I saw, this was the best,
Though if you're (rightly) loath to be impressed
By my opinions, drugged-up and fatigued,
I've reasons that I thought you'd be intrigued:
The dialogue, which flows like seven seas,
Is served in rhyming couplets, much like these,
With iambs counting five in every line.
Delivering the lines, it sounds divine:
The actors speak like poets, to a word;
Pedantic sing-song speech is never heard.
The themes it treats are numerous and strange-
There's death and sex and carpe-diem change-
But love is at the center of the tale:
The confidence that passion can prevail,
The perfect beauty of the spoken word,
The conflict of who will and won't be heard,
And silent cleaning girls who, while they cleanse
Send piercing gazes through the camera lens
(Including one whose speech bookends the show,
Whom Moaning Myrtle's Potter fans will know).

In short: O fans of pentametric verse!
All films, compared with this, seem much the worse.
Its muselike powers I can answer to;
It moved me to perhaps move all of you
To see a movie willing to be art,
To thrill the ear, illuminate the heart.
And does it, in its goal, meet with success?
My answer is, of course, a fervent Yes.

Yes is a cinematic masterpiece. As observed by others, not always positively, Yes is nothing short of contemporary Shakespeare. The iambic pentameter dialogue is delivered so deftly many viewers do not perceive the rhyming for the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film.

Like Shakespeare, profound observations are suggested by minor characters, such as cleaning people. Like Shakespeare the dialogue is effused with wonderful wordplay, humor, intelligence and zesty sex.

Since Yes was written for the screen, layers of content are given visually; like the fact that the cleaning people, for the most part invisible to the primary cast as in real life, are the only characters to address the camera/audience directly.

Sally Potters genius is compounded by the lush visual texture of this film as well as her incredible ambient soundtrack -- I wish I could buy it. My one critical comment is that the dialogue is sometimes difficult to hear. Turn up the volume, this is a profound work.

Let's face up to it, if you enjoy mainstream TV, this movie probably isn't for you. This isn't Friends and Survivor simpleton dreamtime. Art demands the investment of thinking.

Sally Potter is a true visionary: an artist with a striking and unusual visual sense as well as one with a distinctive point of view.
At this point in her film career (the turgid "The Tango Lesson" and the remarkably mannered "The Man Who Cried"...a film even Johnny Depp, Cristina Ricci and Cate Blanchett couldn't save), "Orlando" is arguably her best film but that may have at least as much to do with Tilda Swinton than it does with Potter.
And now there is "Yes," Potter's latest which is at times palpably sensual, silly, irritating and preposterous...but oddly enough never boring.
"Yes" is the story of a love affair between an Irish-American woman, pretentiously called "She" (a sexy, luminescent Joan Allen) and a Lebanese Surgeon, even more pretentiously called "He," apparently without license to perform surgery who is working as a cook and sometime waiter. They meet at a formal, very stuffy dinner that She attends with her insufferable husband, Anthony (Sam Neil)...who promptly ditches She at the beginning of the dinner party to be with his colleagues.
He and She quickly attach themselves to each other both literally and figuratively. They are besotted at first glance and it is with these scenes that Potter seems most at ease: the flirting, the disrobing, the lovemaking all come naturally to Potter's sensibilities and they are truly sexually charged and transcendentally sensual. When Potter ventures into the moral, social and political, she loses focus and the film goes adrift.
Potter has written the entire script in Iambic Pentameter-"The language of Shakespeare" and though at times the verse is a pleasure to hear, most of the time it's just uncomfortable for the actors to speak and therefore for us to hear: adopting modern speech and more to the point modern thoughts to the rhythm of I.P. doesn't always work. Unfortunately, we become too aware of the rhyming to sit back and bask in the beauties of the verse.
"Yes" is always breath-takingly beautiful to watch. There is a scene towards the end of the film between He and She in which Potter lovingly captures He placing his big curly-haired head on She's pale green silk lap that is the essence of what is good about this film: the overt sensuality of the tamed "beast" seeking succor from "beauty": it is a scene that lingers in the mind long after the last frame of the film flickers away.

I think that many of the reviewers of this film contradict themselves. They degrade it as unnecessarily complicated and yet further degrade it as empty, lacking the depth of its aspirations. One reviewer compares it to Shakespeare. Why? Most assume that if a film is to do something as bold and intricate as welcome its entire dialog into iambic pentameter then the director, in her annoyingly avant-garde quest, must fashion some otherworldly vision, something that will "change the way movies are made!", as they say. And YES, I agree, some of the rhymes do fall flat (the reviewer from Japan mentioned the surgical reference), but as I saw it, the rhyming was merely a vehicle to give this lush film a refined elegance and the will to take heart with elements of the fantastic. And why are we so hesitant to allow or accept such a thing? What would have made the surgical reference more acceptable had it been said in prose? Moreover, why don't we all walk around speaking in a sly, well thought-out rhyming pattern? It would be difficult, and would limit our ability to communicate, but then, aren't the most important things those that don't need to be said, or rather can't? What if when speaking to our lover we spoke only in a delicately chartered melody and relied simply on our ability to feel and understand one another to leave the rest unsaid? Language is utterly unimportant, it gets in the way. If people used their feelings more than their mouths I suspect unhappiness would not be as widespread. Take the scene in the film when She demands that her husband argue with her, and he correctly queries as to the point. They know the way they feel, and words, no matter how heated or infused with passion, could never express what needs to felt, not heard. And yet, even our characters understand this. For them, language is like a prison, a way of "talking everything away." She does this for a living, attempting to convince through vocal complexities the many reasons why abortion is not murder, why God does not exist. But remember, this is only what She says, when we hear her thoughts we know she converses with God and begs Him to forgive her for not believing in Him, for playing scientist with cells and organic matter and attempting in her vast loneliness to "penetrate the mind of God." And so, if language is a prison, why not make it beautiful? Why not adorn it with intricacies so that only that which must be said is said? Again the characters understand this. In their confrontation in the parking garage, He asks She how many words in Arabic she can speak, then asking her if she understands the difficulty it takes for a nonnative speaker of English to constantly seek out the rhyming of words, thus admitting that not only do they recognize their odd pattern, but that in his love for her, he battles the very will of language so that what he must say to her is said. They understand their prison. It is words and thoughts that keep them apart, their hearts usher them into the arms of one another.

I'm fully aware that I'm looking deeper than the film requires, but I could just as easily use it as a vehicle to ask in the same manner as I do of why we all don't speak in rhymes, "Why do we hate and hurt one another?"..."Why do we die in wonderment of who's God is King?" The film asks these things. His quest to remain pure to his faith threatens to break them apart, yet in the end they both seemingly realize that regardless of God's preference, He has marred them both with the same loneliness, with the same need for one another. And so if as the film argues, it is true that the word "No" does not exist nor has it ever, when these two lovers look to Heaven and ask of God is it possible that they be together and truly love one another unconditionally and unapologetically without incurring His wrath, then His only response could be...

Some people, referring to the words and the images of `Yes,' often talk about the beauty of the film. With all respect, however, of all the things in the world, beauty is the most subjective kind of value among us. While some love odes written by, say, Keats, others prefer the longer and freer verses of Whitman. So, read the following lines, and see what you can find in Sally Potter's film you are about to see.

I was a doctor. With a knife
I cut the flesh to save the life.

How do you think? If you find the above poem is fantastic, the film is for you. Considerable portion of the film's monologues and dialogues is spoken with Potter's own verses, but to be frank with you (and so frank that you might be offended), I think that hip hop singers these days can think of better rhymes.

The film starts promisingly, with strangely engaging monologues by strangely charming Shirley Henderson as housekeeper looking right into the camera. She talks about the dirt that cannot be gone, and that her existence in the house is virtually "invisible," giving her a good chance to observe the husband and wife, and their troubles.

Then the wife simply called `She' (Joan Allen) appears. She knows the marriage with her husband (typecast Sam Neill) is over. She is born in Ireland, but was raised in America, and works as a doctor (like the quoted poem), but feels the emptiness of life.

Then you meet `He.' He (Simon Abkarian) is a cook from Lebanon, and falls in love with `She' instantly. She also loves `He,' but when they thought everything was looking fine, the difference between their cultural backgrounds start to sour the relations.

I admit the good intention of director Sally Potter, but the contrived methods used by her are not suitable to the complex materials, which involve too many on-going social issues. I am talking about rhymes and meters, which require certain skills of choosing the right words and appropriate images in order to express such controversial issues as ethnicity or religion. I don't say Potter's poems are all bad. But when She and He exchange the words `Imperialist' and `Terrorist,' both of which are uttered in the way far from graceful, the film's initial intention of containing social messages in verbal beauty obviously starts to crumble.

Another problem is the camera. Potter uses too many pointless slant camera and jump-cuts, and even the images from surveillance camera are inserted. What do they want to say? To make matters worse, characters use too many voiceovers, and most annoyingly, they repeat the exact words aloud. Perhaps Potter is thinking about the `steam of consciousness' of James Joyce (hence the title of `Yes' which concludes, if I am not mistaken, one of his books). But the results only fall flat with the words too repetitious. This flaw might be forgiven in `Ulysses,' but not in the spoken words on screen.

The acting is good, especially that of Joan Allen as you can always expect from this hugely talented Oscar nominee even before watching the film, and equally impressive is Shirley Henderson, who is riveting, knowing how to imbue life into the words her character speaks of. But the film itself is made with too heavy-handed direction, which tries to include too many things in 100 minutes.

"YES" is basically a gigantic poem. This is one of those efforts that can easily divide viewer's right down the middle and unless you're familiar with the director and into independent films in general this can be a challenging viewing experience. Story is set in London where we see a completely bored woman (Joan Allen known only as She) in a miserable marriage to an English politician (Sam Neill) and one night while at a dinner party she catches the eye of a restaurant cook. He (Simon Abkarian) is Lebanese and instantly starts to flirt with She and it doesn't take long before both of them are head on into an affair but the one thing that seems to stand in their way isn't her marriage but the difference in nationalities.

These are characters dealing with life from opposite ends of the spectrum. While She examines sperm cells and eggs under a microscope, He, we later find, is a qualified surgeon from Beirut, now reduced to chopping meat in a restaurant. The couple's erotic and tempestuous affair examines cultural identity in post 9/11 London (significantly, filming started on 12th Sept 2001 and it was released shortly after the London bombings).

Ultimately, it's a film about saying "YES" to life and how diversification adds poetic substance to our otherwise stale lives. Even the microscopes used by She to examine our multiplying and mutating genetic code have a life of their own, the lenses appearing as bulbous alien eyes under their dust mask covers. Dirt here is not something that can be swept away, but is regenerative and needs to be confronted. Images of cleaners occur throughout the film, frantically trying to clear up the emotional mess the characters leave in their wake.

The camera work look like it was right out of film school and was a bit annoying. Granted some location photography was excellent....the colors and costume and locations obviously well thought out. I really enjoyed Shirley Henderson, as the cleaner; who began and closed the movie I kept wishing that she had a bigger part in the movie.

So, if you are a poem lover or an independent film lover, I'd recommend it. But if you are just a regular film lover, you might want to stay away from it.

****
YES is not your stereotypical movie. What an understatement! It is written in iambic pentameter (a style of poetry) and is, I suppose, a film that will most appeal to those of us who are intellectuals and literate...however...I STILL liked it! I can see how it would appear boring to many people, because it is deep and intense and it drags when you can't hear the dialogue (because of low volume) or when it is so heavily accented (by the dialects of many different cultures) that you can't figure out what is going on. Nevertheless, it is still a wonderous and marvelous film.

YES is ostensibly the story of a romance between an unsatisfied married Western woman and an Islamic lover. However, it touches on many existential issues beyond romance in the dialogue that is really poetry, but spoken as naturally as possible (NOTE: there are no subtitles...subtitles would have changed this movie from one that is good to one that is great). How hard is it to read poetry and make it sound natural? Really hard...but the actors did their job. I am going to buy this movie and watch it again and again, as it is such a deep movie with such intense acting and themes that it warrants more than one viewing. And I'm hoping that with multiple viewings I'll picked up what I missed even without subtitles.

The acting is incredible and irresistable. The film features a multi-cultural cast and characters...and is so unusual that it is hard to put into words. If you like deep and meaningful movies and don't need a lot of action, but enjoy mulling over existential ideas instead, you will love YES. Probably film critics will love YES. I loved YES. However, if you are a fan of run-of-the-mill American movies, this probably is one to pass on. There isn't a lot of action or entertainment and it is the opposite of shallow; however, it makes you think and feel and reflect about life, love, wars, conflict, relationships, and more.

I would recommend YES for those people who read instead of watch movies, and/or who think deeply about life and relish the idea of a movie that explores the most important issues of our day.
****

I just finished watching this movie. A visual masterpiece! so beautiful and the poetry...so intense. I loved it so much I came directly to amazon to find the DVD one for me and another for my best friend! I'm so happy I just happened to see this movie tonight!

This is a beautifuly written move which makes sense. (Why and how the characters fall in love, as well as the personal lives of each character) there are NO flaws in the character development.
I can see how some people would not like it because of the Poetic Prose, BUT I found that to be what "made" the movie. Shows the writter's brilliance and the intellect and personalitie's of the two main character's make's sense. Perfectly cast. I really love this movie!

"What makes me to dream of you?"
Characters are felt real, conflicts are palpable, and most of all, storytelling flows like visual music.
To create film is to be free and to experience salvation, I suspect that the director might want to say this.