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'Yes' is alternately annoying and engaging

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

In the wake of Sept. 11, after so many voices screamed no no no, filmmaker Sally Potter decided to respond with a yes. Make that "Yes," her (literally) poetic meditation on love in a time of fear.

Actually her movie is about a lot more — to its credit and, sometimes, its detriment. First and foremost, "Yes" is about Joan Allen's translucent skin, birdlike bones, and wearily palpable smarts.

Sony Pictures Classics

'Yes'

The verdict: A movie told in rhyme, both annoying and sublime.

Director: Sally Potter
Starring: Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, Sam Neill, Shirley Henderson, Sheila Hancock
Run time: 100 minutes
Release date: June 24, 2005
Rating: R for language and some sexual content.

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

She plays a woman known only as She (yeah, it's that kind of movie). An Irish-American scientist involved with stem cell research, she's married to — no, not He, but a British politician named Anthony (Sam Neill). Nearing the frayed end of their marriage, they share a home but little else besides a tense truce and a housekeeper (Shirley Henderson), who speak to us directly from the screen, spilling their secrets.

As for He (Simon Abkarian), he's a Lebanese surgeon, transplanted from Beirut to London, where his skill with a knife can only get him work as a restaurant cook.

He and She meet at a lavishly dull political banquet he's working, where she's the only guest with as much light as shadow in her smile. He tells her, "I'd like to steal/ You from the man who cannot see/ That you're a queen."

Oh, did I mention that the dialogue is written in rhyming couplets? Like many of the ideas in "Yes," the gimmick is alternately annoying and engaging. It's what you expect from a risk-taker like Potter, best known for the gender-bending "Orlando" (1992) (in which she cast Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I).

As He and She embark on an affair in "Yes," we start to note their differences. A Muslim, He sees the world as a place of mystery and faith. Her faith, as a lapsed Catholic, resides in science and observable phenomena. They're a study in opposites. Like the movie.

"Yes" could've been titled "The Poetry of Oppositions." Potter sets up a wealth of contrasts and lets them bang together: man/woman, East/West, faith/disbelief, Islam/Christianity, rich/poor, passion/control, individuality/national identity, etc.

The movie doesn't just wear its politics on its shirtsleeves, its politics are its shirtsleeves. And pants. And underwear, too. At one point, the lovers frolic in the tropical surf of Cuba — "a great big dream that's fallen pretty flat," in the words (or thoughts, anyway) of the woman's revolutionary-minded auntie, on her deathbed in Belfast.

"Yes" is about the rise and fall of such dreams, the mistakes people make for all the right reasons, and the daily struggle to see one another clearly when history and cultural prejudices try to blind us. It's a movie as sophisticated as it sometimes is naive.

Even if you're sympathetic to some of Potter's ideas, the filmmaker can sabotage herself. That beach sequence, for instance, is kitsch better suited to the cover of a romance novel. And Potter swamps some scenes with slo-mo/stutter camera effects that call attention to themselves in a movie whose entry-level artificiality makes you work that much harder to suspend your disbelief.

Take, for instance, that rhyming dialogue. While technically skillful, it sometimes trips incomprehensibly off the actors' tongues — especially in the monologues by the mournfully liquid-eyed, squeaky-voiced Henderson.

These lapses are ameliorated by other moments, like a frosty dinner exchange between Allen and Neill, or Allen and Abkarian's explosive argument in a parking garage. The actors are so committed to Potter's vision, they persuade you to go along with them. To go along, to seize the day, to love, and — even when you sometimes know better — to say yes.