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`Yes,' strangers can reach out across the rift

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  • `Yes,' strangers can reach out across the rift

    Boston Herald, MA
    July 1 2005

    `Yes,' strangers can reach out across the rift
    By James Verniere
    Friday, July 1, 2005

    Something sublime happens a few minutes into ``Yes,'' Sally Potter's
    modern romance written entirely in iambic pentameter. It's not that
    you forget it's in verse. It's that you stop paying attention to that
    aspect of this rich, sexy, politically urgent tale of love between
    people of clashing cultures.

    Written in Shakespeare's favorite meter and taking a
    star-crossed-lovers cue from such works of Shakespeare as ``Othello''
    and ``Romeo and Juliet,'' the film is an offbeat triumph.



    Potter's lovers are from two different, but not entirely
    dissimilar, worlds. ``She'' (Joan Allen) is an unhappily married,
    American molecular biologist of Northern Irish descent familiar with
    civil and religious war. ``He'' (Armenian-born French actor Simon
    Abkarian) is a refugee from Beirut, a physician turned disgruntled
    London cook who meets her outside a dinner she attends with her
    British diplomat husband (Sam Neill).

    Her husband is a rake and a heel who lives for seduction and
    loves to betray his wife.

    She finds passion, warmth, companionship and humor in the arms
    of her lover, although she holds the strings because he's living in
    exile and is a virtual pariah in the West.

    In the role of a cleaning lady, the priceless Shirley Henderson
    is a one-woman Greek chorus, commenting on the action and reminding
    us of the real and symbolic ``dirt'' we accumulate in life. The film
    is a rhapsodic depiction of bridge-building between East andWest,
    Christian and Muslim, male and female, art and life.

    Potter, a Brit with a background in dance, theater, music and
    film, wrote ``Yes'' as a response to 9/11 and to what she calls ``the
    demonization of the Middle East . . . and parallel wave of hatred
    against America.'' The film is rather obviously meant to force the
    two cultures to look at one another and see similarities and shared
    goals and interests. But Allen, who is quietly amassing her
    generation's most impressive body of work, and Abkarian keep it
    grounded in the immediate concerns of two people struggling to keep
    an unlikely love affair alive.

    The film's title is also a reminder of Molly Bloom's incantatory
    litany at the closing of James Joyce's ``Ulysses.'' Like Joyce's
    monumental novel, Potter's fine, if somewhat more modest, achievement
    is both a work of art and a celebration of art's power to redeem the
    world. Say yes.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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