Vote No On 'Yes'
Potter's audacious idea founders on tired cliches.

You have to credit filmmaker Sally Potter for sheer audacity. In her breakout feature, Orlando, she tackled Virginia Woolf's gender-bending historical fantasy and made a masterpiece, thanks to a stunning performance by Tilda Swinton as the hero/heroine of the title. Next, Potter made The Tango Lesson, in which she had the nerve to cast herself as an English filmmaker having a torrid affair with an Argentine tango instructor in Paris. The result was one of the most pretentious, self-serving cinematic wet dreams ever endured by a sentient ticket-buying public.

If Potter's new film, Yes, is the tie-breaking vote, the jury is still out. There are moments of startling wit and insightóbut not nearly enough of them. For starters, Potter writes the entire script in iambic pentameter; the surprise is, the trenchant verse and the skillful ease with which the talented cast delivers it is the best thing about the movie. It's the story that gets Potter into trouble, an allegory about East vs West in an increasingly edgy and polarized post 9/11 world, masquerading as a love story about a torrid affair (sigh) between an American woman and a Lebanese man in London.

Joan Allen plays "She" (Potter coyly refuses to name her protagonists, except by these gender pronouns), an Irish-American chemist born in war-torn Belfast who's neglected (we never know why) by her corporate honcho hubby (Sam Neill). "He" (Simon Abkarian) is a surgeon ousted from Beirut for political reasons eking out a living as a restaurant cook in a multi-ethnic kitchen staffed by a spike-haired young Irishman, a Scot, and a West Indian. The stage is set for endless polemical debates (some of which occasionally hit home), but none of these characters resonate as real humans; they're attitudes flung at each other for maximum friction. In particular, Potter can't make us care whether her didatically opposed lovers stay together or not.

The simple details of daily life also elude Potter. Lowly cook "He" for some reason is waiting tables in a tux at the fancy event when he meets "She" (coming on to her with every Latin Lover cliché in the bookófor which she easily falls). In one "ew"-inducing scene, he pleasures her by hand in a cafe, while the waiters beam indulgently. The white sterility of Neill's house vs. the vibrant colors of Abkarian's flat is an overused visual cliché, and Potter's stop-motion strobe montages are hugely irritating.

Things jolt to life briefly toward the end, with a voice-over monologue by Allen's dying Irish auntie of intoxicating brilliance. But even this can't save this unwieldy experiment, devolving as it does into a prolonged finale in (oh, please) Cuba, presented without irony as a paradise of freedom and self-determination.

YES With Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, and Sam Neill. Written and directed by Sally Potter. A Sony Classics release. Rated R. 100 minutes. (**)
Review published in Good Times, July 21, 2005