Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20119 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-01-09
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Synopsis
Oscar nominee Joan Allen gives a remarkable performance in Sally Potter's 'Yes', an extraordinary look at love and politics set in London, Belfast, Beirut, and Havana. Allen stars as an unnamed Irish-American scientist disillusioned with her marriage to Anthony, who is more interested in his political job - and other women. Fed up with his affairs, she falls for an unnamed Arab cook and begins a torrid sexual relationship with him. A successful molecular biologist, she also puts her life under a microscope, but she is afraid to go after what she really wants. Meanwhile, her lover is much more open about the things he used to have when he was in Lebanon, reduced now to working in a British kitchen in order to barely survive; he comes to resent that she pays for everything in their romance, leading to tension and extreme situations. Writer-director Potter ('Orlando') shows a sharp eye for the human condition and the fragility of love in this unusual and extraordinary film in which all of the characters speak in iambic pentameter. In addition to mixing in different styles, including slow motion, grainy shots, and freeze frames, Potter has a series of maids, especially the one played by Shirley Henderson, face the camera, reacting to what is going on around them. Henderson often addresses the audience, humorously pointing out that no matter how thorough people are there is still always a little dirt to be cleaned up.

Customer Reviews

Less than the sum of its parts.
I'll start by saying that I watch a lot of low-budget films and like odd concepts or new ideas. I didn't read any reviews before watching this. I can't remember why I ever chose it in the first place.

I did watch it all of the way through, but it was a struggle at times.

The problem with the film is the attempt to make all of the dialoge rhyme. I found this extremely annoying. With normal speech the flim would have been instantly a lot better. The worst rhyme I spotted was "grieving" and "leaving". It also put a straight-jacket onto the ebb and flow of the scenes.

I watched the extra features and it appears that the director really did put her heart into this, believing that she was revealing truths about the differences between men and women, east and west, and different religions. Sadly, she was deluded. There's a great moment at 16:19 in the extra feature where the two poor actors look at each other as the director explains what she wants. It's a look that suggested to me "we're professionals, we'll do anything, but what is she on?".

I found the cleaning maid monlogues entertaining. The use of cleaners in many scenes and their expressions also made me laugh. The Jamaican "all for jesus" kitchen worker was also mildly amusing.

In general, the characters seemed very shallow and the plot very contrived. When the Irish aunt died I thought "so what?". The Scottish kitchen workers seemed pure stereotype.

I read online reviews after I had watched the film and it looks like about 70% of people were not impressed with it. I'm usually the first to defend films that receive a drubbing from the masses who fail to appreciate them, but this time I'm with the masses.

A poor film, with some moments of excellence in it, mainly from the actors.

"Yes" is a poetic film regarding the cycle of life.
"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.

A Pleasant Disappointment?
It's the story that's starting to become quite over-used recently. East meets West, religious meets atheist, white meets brown, in the form of lovers drawn to each other by strong, physical attraction. Sally Potter has to make this cliched scenario damn good and very unique for it to produce anything memorable. She starts off by perfectly casting Joan Allen as 'She', the fragile, ethereal beauty- a successful career woman trapped in a dead marriage to an unfaithful husband. Even better is her choice of 'He', played by Simon Akabarian, a harsh-featured but dark handsome who is excellent in his portrayal of the passionate, intelligent, and spiritual Middle Eastern man. Sally Potter wrote and directed this love story brilliantly, highlighting how such people come together- drawn to each other by the mystery of their differences, and yet (as with the cliche punch-line of this type of story) discovering they are essentially looking for the same things and start seeking them in each other. Potter however, saves this from just being another soppy love story shot artistically, by creating a dialogue made up mostly of iambic pentameter (think Shakespeare meets Eminem). So powerfully written, the beauty of the script really is the gem in this film, making it pleasant not only to watch but to hear...
So why the disappointment? The love story central to this film brings to light many themes: identity, race, religion, sexuality, and spirituality and deals with the themes aptly by the power of the writing and its unique style. But then comes the painfully and ridiculously long monologue of She's aunt which rambles on about politics and death. Every now and then, the amusing (but slightly irritating) cleaner pops up (likened, by other reviews I've read, to a Greek chorus in a play) as she speaks directly to the camera in monologues suggesting themes of shame, secrets, and hidden desires. And of course random shots of Sam Neill (playing She's husband) listening and air guitaring to some kind of loud blues music (BB King, I think?!). All these scenes seemed to break the beautiful flow of this film, adding too much to an already intense film brimming with thought, and making it seem disjointed in terms of the content and themes it's trying to portray, and generally distracting from the main plot. The story of He and She is quite a lot to grasp on its own, with both those characters well-developed and presented whereas some of the other characters (the god-daughter, the Aunt, possibly even the cleaner) seemed unnecessary.
'Yes' started out well and at it's core, is a great film, a great love story, and great film-making. But somewhere along the line, a writer got ambitious and started cramming in a 1001 ideas on life, society, and the world.

In short:
Watch it, fall in love with the story and struggle of She and He as they fall in love, but let the peripheral stories and characters pass you by in a forgettable blur.