YES

Although her visions are uniquely her own, Sally Potter's measured compositional style and pictorial techniques often bring to mind her fellow British filmmaker, Peter Greenaway.  While his background is in art and hers is in music and dance, both these auteurs share a penchant for striking visuals and increasingly oblique ideas.

Greenaway, for instance, has used skin several times--whether baked (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) or removed (Pillow Book)-- to make a particular point about the human/in-human condition, while Potter has tended to focus on women--both fictional (Orlando) and autobiographical (The Tango Lesson).  Both directors are also writers, which allows each to move deeper into his/her private visions.  For Greenaway, the ultimate has to be his recent three-part saga, The Tulse Luper Suitcases, s een at this year's Tribeca Film Fest, and for Potter it's Yes, seen at Cannes.

With that single syllable, the first word of Molly Bloom's glorious soliloquy as well as the last word of Joyce's monumental Ulysses, Potter has slammed a curve ball straight into left field. For Yes is written in the rhymed couplets of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Moliere, for no discernible reason.

It's a contemporary tale of adultery-cum-love-story with geopolitical aspirations, featuring two characters named "she" (Oscar winner Joan Allen, a credible alter-ego stand-in for Potter herself) and "he'" (Lebanese stage and screen actor Simon Abkarian, think a young Omar Sharif).  Since most of the others in the film have names, these unnamed characters are a bad sign.

The cast handles the dreaded rhyme scheme with varying degrees of success. As in many of Moliere's rhymed epics--- Tartuffe or The Imaginary Invalid, for example--Potter opens with a sassy maid, here called "cleaner"--perhaps for some egalitarian reason--and played with exceptional skill by Shirley Henderson.  As the "cleaner" sets the scenes to follow and comments throughout, one scarcely hears the rhymes, which is as it should be.  n Henderson's mouth, the poetry exists but doesn't intrude.   However, not all the actors are as adept as Henderson. Best of the rest are Sam Neill as Allen's philandering husband and veteran British stage actress, Sheila Hancock, as her dying aunt.  Abkarian's own accent works well enough against the rhyme scheme, but Allen is all sing-song in her delivery.  To be fair, her particular lines are written as sheer doggerel, leaving the actress little room to speak them as normal language.

So one must question Potter's choice to write in verse at all.  In the press notes and her introduction to the book (yes, there is a book!) she says, "The film is about the rhyming of contradictions," whatever the hell that means! She also speaks of 9/11 and Iraq, which bring to mind another word: "hubris."

Not only are her protagonists mere symbols, they are pretentious symbols--as if because Allen's neglected wife comes from Northern Ireland and Akbarian's émigré from Beirut, Potter believes they represent some larger global truth.  They do not.

Without its soundtrack (incidental music by Potter as well), the two lovers do make an exotic (if somewhat less than erotic) visual pairing, which the director displays to great effect. But Potter will have them speak and their story--with or without the couplets--is banal beyond words.

 Leslie (Hoban) Blake