"YES": A Review of the Movie

My Netflix queue is so long that by the time a film gets to the top of the list and arrives in the mail I’ve often forgotten why I put it on the list in the first place. Sometimes it’s an ad on a previous DVD, sometimes from an article I read in some obscure place -- almost NEVER a result of an automated suggestion. One kind of film I search for is the foreign film explosion of the late Fifties when I was an undergrad in Chicago. In those days one went to a show house or to a film society with a 16mm projector, and endlessly analyzed what one saw. There was no relationship at all to the contemporary habit of piling up on one’s sofa to mindlessly kill some time while snacking.

One of the films from those days that hit me square between the eyes was “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” by Marguerite Duras. It was erotic, of course, because it was about a French woman attending a peace conference in Hiroshima and having an affair with a Japanese man there. The scene of the two of them in the shower together was a revelation to me -- I didn’t know you could DO that, much less film it. The real subject, again of course, was how to cross the divides between the sexes, the cultures, the peaceful and the warmongers.

I didn’t know that Sally Potter’s “YES” would be an even more modern and expressionist version of the same classic story. Maybe I only ordered it because the “yes” of Molly Bloom at the end of “Ulysses” is one of my favorite sermon devices when I’m in the company of other UU ministers. It always gets a laugh because they know it’s about sex and they think no one else knows that -- though it’s really about saying yes to life. (Is there a difference? Answer in less than 2,000 words.) Ministers don’t get to say “yes” as much as they would like to. They tend to feel the edge of the Apollonian/Dionysian split because it is sometimes the choice between their vocation and being thrown out. Or used to be.

Until minutes into the film, I didn’t realize that everyone was speaking in iambic pentameter -- easily, I might say, like very excellent Shakespearean actors. The cinematography was striking, arty, but not distracting. The framing device of cleaning women “who know more about you than you know about yourself” was entertaining as well as objectifying and a good feminist balance to the almost too mandarin woman doctor.

The Lebanese former doctor-- now putting his surgery to use in a luxury hotel kitchen -- and the female embryologist research doctor are at opposite ends of the experience of life. The Lebanese was right up against the boundary between life and death in terms of violence; the embryologist talks theory about conception while working in a lab where at night the binocular microscopes are sheathed in condom-like plastic. She is the Apollonian, living in a white, sharp-edged, stripped-out house. He is the Dionysian, taking her to a bed of purple, red and orange silk. The actress is cat-faced, pale, blonde, nearly without makeup and certainly without body fat. The actor is dark, tousled, with a noble nose and gallant mustache. We never see her dance; HE dances. It is only after the physical relationship is established that the politics of gender and national culture begin to drive them apart. The final meeting ground is Marxist: Cuba.

For me, absorbing as this film is, the “special features” on the DVD are more important: crucially important. Sally Potter is a theatrical polymath: writer, director, dancer, composer, and so on. Her method is that emotional-but-disciplined plunge into the unknowns of theatre as inner-life-made-explicit that was so much at the heart of what we thought was a world revolution in the Sixties and Seventies. Arising out of the peace movement and determination to get to the heart of war -- esp. ambiguous and tortured wars like Vietnam -- as well as tolerance of altered consciousness and ambivalence about asceticism/eroticism, we wanted to get to the truth. The question was whether we could “handle the truth.” Sally hasn’t given up this inquiry. I would suggest that too many others have.

When Orpheus descended into hell to try to bring his lover out through the use of art, in his case music, he didn’t take any notes. But Sally Potter does. She blogs, she forums, she websites, she never hesitates to use electronic communications. I’ve signed up for her newsletter, just as I’ve cast off from Val McDermid’s. (Val writes ghastly murder mysteries used on “Wire in the Blood.” I consider her to be perverting something once earnest and pure.)

I know this is the right thing to do, because of this entry by Sally Potter on her own website. It is a list of reminders to herself as she started work on a movie called “Rage.” It is wise enough to guide Barack Obama -- maybe he has a similar list.

The best time to start is now (don’t wait)

Take responsibility for everything (it saves time)

Don’t blame anyone or anything (including yourself)

Give up being a moviemaker victim (of circumstance, weather, lack of money, mean financiers, vicious critics, greedy distributors, indifferent public, etc.)

You can’t always choose what happens while you are making a film, but you can choose your point of view about what happens
(creative perspective)

Mistakes are your best teacher (so welcome them)

Turn disaster to advantage (there will be many)

Only work on something you believe in (life is too short to practice insincerity)

Choose your team carefully and honour them (never speak negatively about your colleagues)

Ban the word “compromise” (or the phrase “it will do”)
(the disappointment in yourself will haunt you later)

Be prepared to work harder than anyone you are employing

Be ruthless – be ready to throw away your favourite bits (you may well be attached to what is familiar rather than what is good).

Aim beyond your limits (and help others to go beyond theirs)
(the thrill of the learning curve)

When in doubt, project yourself ten years into the future and look back – what will you be proud of having done?
(indecision is a lack of the longer view or wider perspective)

Practice no waste – psychic ecology – prevent brain pollution
(don’t add to the proliferation of junk)

Be an anorak – keep your sense of wonder and enthusiasm
(cynicism will kill your joy and motivation)

Get some sleep when you can (you wont get much later)

For me the moment of deep recognition came on the DVD extra when days of rehearsal, honing the message, coincided with a political move described in the newspapers that appeared to doom peace yet again, this time in Iraq. Sally and her two main actors, laid bare by fatique, sat weeping at a table, stunned and yet more determined. This is where the truth is found.