Writer/director Sally Potter's movie "Yes" gives us an inkling - at least in terms of style -of what it might be like if Shakespeare were alive today and writing screenplays (though one hopes that they would turn out considerably better than this one happens to be). The "unique" characteristic of the film is that the characters discuss the meaning of life and the complexities of relationships entirely in poetic verse. Pure rhymes, slant rhymes, internal rhymes - virtually every type of rhyme can be found in this film. The problem is that the novelty of the conceit wears off mighty quickly, so that all we are ultimately left with are a bunch of pretentious, whiney characters driving us crazy with their high-toned blathering. Allow me to propose a simple rule of thumb: you know you'll be needing a sturdy pair of hip boots to wade through any movie, play or novel in which two of the main characters are referred to simply as He and She.
I hope I won't be dismissed as a Philistine for objecting to this film. As a matter of fact, I am always open for anything even remotely novel and different in film-making, and I actually quite like the idea of a movie that plays like an extended poem. The problem is that I just couldn't stand any of the people we were being asked to care about in this particular work. Joan Allen and Sam Neill play a middle-aged English couple whose marriage has long ago become a hollow shell. They are clearly intended to be models of the enervated upper class - cynical, bored, filled with ennui and unable to communicate their innermost thoughts and feelings to one another - but we've seen these types of characters and marriages so many times before that Anthony and She feel more like caricatures than actual people (I'm not quite sure why he gets a real name and she - I mean She - doesn't, but no matter). And their speaking in verse only makes them all that more insufferable in their pseudo-profundity and monumental self-absorption.
Allen, due to her extraordinary gifts as an actress, is at least able to cut through the pretentiousness and create some feeling for her character, but Neill and Simon Abkarian (who looks distressingly like Borat), as a chef from Beirut who becomes her lover (he's the He to Allen's She), are not quite so fortunate. Moreover, to make matters worse, in a movie in which language plays such a crucial part, some of the accents are so thick that much of the dialogue is simply incomprehensible. That only compounds the frustration of watching the movie.
There are some genuinely lyrical moments when the movie seems to be working and we can see what the filmmakers were trying to get at. But, unfortunately, those wind up being too few and far between to keep us from voting a resounding "Nay" to "Yes."
I hope I won't be dismissed as a Philistine for objecting to this film. As a matter of fact, I am always open for anything even remotely novel and different in film-making, and I actually quite like the idea of a movie that plays like an extended poem. The problem is that I just couldn't stand any of the people we were being asked to care about in this particular work. Joan Allen and Sam Neill play a middle-aged English couple whose marriage has long ago become a hollow shell. They are clearly intended to be models of the enervated upper class - cynical, bored, filled with ennui and unable to communicate their innermost thoughts and feelings to one another - but we've seen these types of characters and marriages so many times before that Anthony and She feel more like caricatures than actual people (I'm not quite sure why he gets a real name and she - I mean She - doesn't, but no matter). And their speaking in verse only makes them all that more insufferable in their pseudo-profundity and monumental self-absorption.
Allen, due to her extraordinary gifts as an actress, is at least able to cut through the pretentiousness and create some feeling for her character, but Neill and Simon Abkarian (who looks distressingly like Borat), as a chef from Beirut who becomes her lover (he's the He to Allen's She), are not quite so fortunate. Moreover, to make matters worse, in a movie in which language plays such a crucial part, some of the accents are so thick that much of the dialogue is simply incomprehensible. That only compounds the frustration of watching the movie.
There are some genuinely lyrical moments when the movie seems to be working and we can see what the filmmakers were trying to get at. But, unfortunately, those wind up being too few and far between to keep us from voting a resounding "Nay" to "Yes."