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| Released: |
2005 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
ROMANCE
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| Origin: |
UK/ US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
95 |
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No. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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| Long, painful experience has taught me to beware any drama in which the protagonists are called He and She, any piece not written by Shakespeare that claims to be in rhyming iambic pentameters, any film that’s Lottery-funded, and anything that’s written and directed by Sally Potter. Yes fulfils all four criteria. | | It’s a talky, stilted, would-be intellectual film about an east-west romance between a married American woman living in London (Joan Allen, pictured right) and a Lebanese chef who used to be a surgeon (Simon Abkarian, pictured left). Issues of race, gender, religion and politics are touched upon, though to no great dramatic or emotional effect. | | Smugness, pretentiousness and a weirdly unfounded sense of intellectual superiority run through the film. Dramatically, it’s more-or-less inert, and visually it’s full of self-congratulatory attempts to show off, rather like a first film-school project. | | Sally Potter has never fulfilled the promise of her debut, the 1992 Orlando, and her biggest problem is the terrifying banality of her writing. When she attempts a form as literary as the rhyming iambic pentameter, it would help if she understood at least the basics of rhyming and scansion. | | The actors do their best with her limping doggerel, but no actor on earth could disguise the illiteracy of statements such as “I did not mean to infer that you were over-large” (meaning “I did not mean to imply that you were fat”, which may not be an iambic pentameter but has the merit of at least making sense). | | Yes is, I fear, appalling verse.As cinema, it’s even worse. | |
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