Friday, July 15, 2005 'Yes' is highly stylized, visually and verbally By BILL WHITE SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER "Yes," the last word of James Joyce's "Ulysses," is the final affirmation in Sally Potter's film about the religious, political and moral implications of an adulterous affair between a Western woman and an Islamic man. Born in Ireland, raised in America and living in England, She (Joan Allen) is without a country. Self-absorbed, she sees herself as a woman of the world, but is a tourist in all circumstances of her life. He (Simon Abkarian) is a Lebanese surgeon, currently working in London as a cook. Proud and vain, he sees himself as a king exiled among heathens who find it impossible to even pronounce his name. Their affair begins shortly after She discovers that her husband (Sam Neill) has broken a rule of their open marriage by committing an infidelity on home ground. Seduced with poetry on the order of "you are my secret country," She rushes into a relationship that is rife with trite overhead shots of carefully posed figures on a bed. The film's central scene, which Potter wrote in response to 9/11, is a polemic on the breakdown of East-West relations in the guise of a breakup scene between the ill-matched lovers. She accepts his condemnation of her insipidly pale skin as a declaration of war, and soon they are spitting the words "terrorist" and "imperialist" at each other. The scene is as politically naive as it is dramatically ludicrous. Yet, in the artificiality of Potter's visually and verbally stylized film, it has a power that overrides its weaknesses. The script, written in iambic pentameter, follows the Shakespearean model in that each character group speaks a different type of verse. From the fast, almost rapping rhymes of the kitchen workers to the slow, measured cadences of the upper classes, the characters are defined as much by their speech as their circumstances. Music also is associated with particular characters. The world fusion of Philip Glass underscores She's cultural amorphousness, while B.B. King's blues is a lucid expression of the husband's desire for emotional expression. The film's most passionate scene takes place in a Belfast hospital where She pays a belated visit to her dying aunt. The dialogue is almost entirely the interior
monologue of the comatose aunt, which seems to be telepathically understood by the prodigal niece. Presiding over the film is the all-knowing presence of The Cleaner (Shirley Henderson), whose belief that "dirt doesn't go away, it just gets moved around" leads to the concept that "no does not exist; there is only yes." From the floating particles of dirt that open the film to the final image of a man and woman on a beach, "Yes" insists that we live with our mistakes since there is no escaping them.