Film Reviews

Yes

• Rating:
• Director: Sally Potter
• Starring: Joan Allen
• Details: UK/US / 95 mins / 15 Cert

Sally Potter is an English writer/director who has worked in music, dance and performance art and whose films follow steps first taken in the London Film Makers' Co-op in the early 1970s. She is of the generation, if not the precise milieu or creative sensibility, that gave us Terence Davies, Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway. Potter's films offer the audience a challenge that is both formal and thematic, and grounded in a feminist understanding. And because she works with comparatively low budgets her films tend to reveal a beneficial tension that can emerge when vision is tempered by resources.

Yes is closer to being a piece of conceptual artwork than it is to being a conventional film. An American woman born in Belfast, She (Allen), encounters a man, He (Abkarian), who is a refugee from the Lebanon. There are other characters peripheral but pertinent to the need She and He find answered, affirmatively, in each other. And there is a risky formal conceit in that the dialogue - including internal monologue and a maid's (Henderson) comedic address to camera - is delivered in iambic pentameter verse. The effect is almost like a musical in that we get lyrics, but no songs. The relationship between He and She is made somewhat abstract by this, their interchanges often lack the urgency of their flesh and blood. Instead what unfolds is like a single discourse that spills through the mouths of every character. A discourse that expresses Potter's questioning of what it is to carry the baggage of ethnic identity, and the baggage of being she and he.

Review by Ted Sheehy