Product Description

She an irish-american scientist is being strangled by her marriage with anthony. She begins an affair with he a lebanese surgeon exiled in london. Their passion is the start of a personal journey through several countries but also forces them to evaluate their beliefs and each other. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 05/23/2006 Starring: Joan Allen Simon Abkarian Run time: 100 minutes Rating: R Director: Sally Potter

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31363 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2005-11-08
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 100 minutes

Amazon.com
It's unsurprising that a movie written in rhyming verse would have stilted or self-conscious moments--but the sumptuous beauty, sinuous rhythms, and cinematic intricacies of Yes may astonish viewers who expect something stuffy or antiquarian. The plot is little more than an affair between an unnamed Irish-American biologist (Joan Allen, once the queen of repression in The Ice Storm, now becoming an art-house sexpot in this and Off the Map) and an unnamed Middle-Eastern chef (Simon Abkarian, Ararat), yet the movie explores just about everything: Marriage, religion, international politics, motherhood, and the nature of zero, while travelling from London to Belfast to Beirut to Havana. Writer/director Sally Potter (Orlando, The Tango Lesson) has enormous ambitions; Yes abounds with complex ideas and daring flourishes, both verbal and visual, juxtaposing the austere and the erotic, intellect and grief. If not everything succeeds, what doesn't is more than made up for by what does. Also featuring Sam Neill (The Piano, Jurassic Park) as Allen's aloof husband and Shirley Henderson (Topsy-Turvy) as a housecleaner with a philosophical perspective on dirt. --Bret Fetzer

From The New Yorker
Nobody could accuse the British director Sally Potter of repeating herself. Every project has the air of an adventure, and this new one is the riskiest to date. Joan Allen plays a nameless and discontented scientist living in London. Sam Neill plays her sighing cad of a husband, and Simon Abkarian plays the Lebanese surgeon turned chef with whom she falls in love. The story of their trysting is ominously slim, and the final switch of location to Cuba feels like a slightly desperate, if strongly flavored, shot of the exotic. The movie is rife with similar shifts, as the images melt, thaw, and resolve themselves into a variety of textures and tones; what is more, the screenplay is composed wholly in rhyming couplets. These are delivered, and sometimes disguised, with great suppleness, especially by Neill, but they work far better in rushes of wrath and dissent than in the more lyrical moods, and the whole conceit will strike you as either dazzling or vacantly precious, according to taste. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Poetry for the twenty-first century!
I highly recommend the movie Yes.
I saw it just today and I confess,
That having had today four teeth removed
I spent the day with films and never moved.
Of all the shows I saw, this was the best,
Though if you're (rightly) loath to be impressed
By my opinions, drugged-up and fatigued,
I've reasons that I thought you'd be intrigued:
The dialogue, which flows like seven seas,
Is served in rhyming couplets, much like these,
With iambs counting five in every line.
Delivering the lines, it sounds divine:
The actors speak like poets, to a word;
Pedantic sing-song speech is never heard.
The themes it treats are numerous and strange-
There's death and sex and carpe-diem change-
But love is at the center of the tale:
The confidence that passion can prevail,
The perfect beauty of the spoken word,
The conflict of who will and won't be heard,
And silent cleaning girls who, while they cleanse
Send piercing gazes through the camera lens
(Including one whose speech bookends the show,
Whom Moaning Myrtle's Potter fans will know).

In short: O fans of pentametric verse!
All films, compared with this, seem much the worse.
Its muselike powers I can answer to;
It moved me to perhaps move all of you
To see a movie willing to be art,
To thrill the ear, illuminate the heart.
And does it, in its goal, meet with success?
My answer is, of course, a fervent Yes.

Brilliant
Yes is a cinematic masterpiece. As observed by others, not always positively, Yes is nothing short of contemporary Shakespeare. The iambic pentameter dialogue is delivered so deftly many viewers do not perceive the rhyming for the first 15 or 20 minutes of the film.

Like Shakespeare, profound observations are suggested by minor characters, such as cleaning people. Like Shakespeare the dialogue is effused with wonderful wordplay, humor, intelligence and zesty sex.

Since Yes was written for the screen, layers of content are given visually; like the fact that the cleaning people, for the most part invisible to the primary cast as in real life, are the only characters to address the camera/audience directly.

Sally Potters genius is compounded by the lush visual texture of this film as well as her incredible ambient soundtrack -- I wish I could buy it. My one critical comment is that the dialogue is sometimes difficult to hear. Turn up the volume, this is a profound work.

Let's face up to it, if you enjoy mainstream TV, this movie probably isn't for you. This isn't Friends and Survivor simpleton dreamtime. Art demands the investment of thinking.

Love Has No Pride
Sally Potter is a true visionary: an artist with a striking and unusual visual sense as well as one with a distinctive point of view.
At this point in her film career (the turgid "The Tango Lesson" and the remarkably mannered "The Man Who Cried"...a film even Johnny Depp, Cristina Ricci and Cate Blanchett couldn't save), "Orlando" is arguably her best film but that may have at least as much to do with Tilda Swinton than it does with Potter.
And now there is "Yes," Potter's latest which is at times palpably sensual, silly, irritating and preposterous...but oddly enough never boring.
"Yes" is the story of a love affair between an Irish-American woman, pretentiously called "She" (a sexy, luminescent Joan Allen) and a Lebanese Surgeon, even more pretentiously called "He," apparently without license to perform surgery who is working as a cook and sometime waiter. They meet at a formal, very stuffy dinner that She attends with her insufferable husband, Anthony (Sam Neil)...who promptly ditches She at the beginning of the dinner party to be with his colleagues.
He and She quickly attach themselves to each other both literally and figuratively. They are besotted at first glance and it is with these scenes that Potter seems most at ease: the flirting, the disrobing, the lovemaking all come naturally to Potter's sensibilities and they are truly sexually charged and transcendentally sensual. When Potter ventures into the moral, social and political, she loses focus and the film goes adrift.
Potter has written the entire script in Iambic Pentameter-"The language of Shakespeare" and though at times the verse is a pleasure to hear, most of the time it's just uncomfortable for the actors to speak and therefore for us to hear: adopting modern speech and more to the point modern thoughts to the rhythm of I.P. doesn't always work. Unfortunately, we become too aware of the rhyming to sit back and bask in the beauties of the verse.
"Yes" is always breath-takingly beautiful to watch. There is a scene towards the end of the film between He and She in which Potter lovingly captures He placing his big curly-haired head on She's pale green silk lap that is the essence of what is good about this film: the overt sensuality of the tamed "beast" seeking succor from "beauty": it is a scene that lingers in the mind long after the last frame of the film flickers away.