Yes

Not since Shakespeare's day have playwrights written entire screenplays in iambic pentameter, but writer/director Sally Potter might single-handedly start the trend again. However, it took me over a half hour to realize that the whole film was one epic poem – before then all I thought was, "This dialogue is horrible! People don't actually speak like this!" But that's the point. Poetry is not meant to imitate average speech. That's why it's poetry.

Joan Allen plays a lonely wife (whose name is never mentioned) trapped in a loveless marriage who has a fiercely passionate affair with a Muslim man from Lebanon. Because she was born in Northern Ireland (but raised, however, in America), she thinks she understands her lover's pain and suffering as an Arab man living in London. These two lovers fight about race, class, religion, politics, stereotypes, and identity, and with the recent bombings on the London Underground, this film is unsettlingly too relevant. Yes is a superb love poem that speaks volumes about what we, as a society, are afraid to mention in our post-9/11 world. But unfortunately, sitting through this film feels more like homework than pleasure.

Sally Potter has in my view made a masterpiece.

To challenge every issue from racism to religion to cultural difference, let alone to the big question, the what's it all about question, and all in one film is astounding but to do this with such daring, the rhyming verse, structure, cinematography, musical score is nothing short of genius. Joan Allen is remarkable as She. Her beauty is second only to her delivery of the some of the most intelligent and profound verse that I have ever heard. Shiela Hancock's death speech sits on its own as an inspired piece of writing. There are so many great moments in this film, there is no point in trying to list them, but do look out for the wine bar scene!

Potter has reminded me why film is great.

Thank you Sally Potter.

I saw this film at the Telluride Film Festival and cannot wait to watch it over and over again. It was by far the festival favorite for everyone I talked to (minus a few teenage boys).

Sally Potter does a wonderful job of turning what could be a cliché story about a white woman falling in love with a man from the middle east into a socially, sexually, and emotionally conscious film.

The style itself is truly Potter with breathtaking cinematography that plays color and costume together in a well choreographed filmic space.

The use of verse throughout the film only adds to the plot and the characters' intensity.

All I can say is go see it, you will not be sorry. 10/10

Sally Potter's Yes premiered this evening at the Toronto International Film Festival before a 1300-strong crowd, with the director and star Joan Allen in attendance. I am so grateful to have been present at this extraordinary event (the film is still in negotiations for distribution). Yes is a love story between She (Joan Allen, stunning in the role of a lifetime) and He (Simon Akbarian). She is married (to Sam Neill, who manages to play both boorish and sympathetic), a scientist, and Irish-American, living in London - a city Potter loves to photograph and whose different, colliding cultures she conveys superbly. He is Lebanese, working as a chef in London. She meets He. Love ensues.

It sounds so simple, and in a sense it is. The film is luminous, elegant, ravishingly beautiful, subtly erotic. The love scenes feel so natural. And yet -- all the dialogue is spoken in rhymed iambic pentameter. Scenes are shot from canted angles, through glass or water, sometimes from CCTV cameras. Jump-cuts, motion blur, internal monologue, an unsettling score - all these elements challenge the simplicity of the idea of love. He and She are unnamed, but they have backgrounds, political and religious beliefs that take the narrative so far beyond the usual romantic pap of Hollywood cinema. Every frame and every gesture invites multiple viewings and multiple readings, partly for the precision and lush beauty (each city has its own colour scheme), and because so many other films and paintings are evoked (including an audacious nod to Orlando early on!) And because this is a Sally Potter film, the passion and the politics have a strain of humour. Or in this case, a frame, provided by Shirley Henderson as She's cleaning woman. Her opening and closing monologues in the whiteness of She's London house are immediately engaged, and totally unlike anything else you'll see or hear in film (at least English-language film). In fact, that's a good summary: Yes is totally unlike anything you've seen before.

I was tempted to do this comment in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets, but somebody from the "New Yorker" has already done it, and of course I would have run the risk of doing an even worse job than Sally Potter has.

Not that this is such a bad film – it's different from the normal run of romantic comedies. At times it becomes quite didactic as "He" asserts the Muslim philosophical position and "She" replies for the secular West. The dying Ulster communist Aunt's story is also an unusual ingredient. Even the more conventional elements – the alienated husband (Sam Neil), the empty affluence, the troubled teenager (Stephanie Leonidas), are deftly handled. I say "romantic comedy" because the film ends like one, but it could have equally ended as tragedy. "He" and "She" are both missing something, and find it in each other, only to discover that love does not always conquer all. One could blow one's brains out. But then one can always high-tail it to Cuba instead.

This is a very artful piece of film-making with some very clever camera-work and adroit use of music, but we still have a very ordinary story. Joan Allen as "she" does manage to transcend the material and make us care about her character, which is quite an achievement as the character is a beautiful middle-class Irish-American ice princess scientist stuck in a dead marriage whose only real passion is in what's at the other end of her microscope. It's interesting how she manages to appear so radiant, 10 years younger in fact, after her first roll in the hay with "He".

"He", the French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian, comes across to start with as a bit of a cliché, the handsome charming feckless foreigner. He is not helped by the aforesaid iambic pentameter, which was not designed for foreigners speaking English. He has to utter one of the most insincere-sounding pick-up lines I have ever heard: "If I was your husband I would be so jealous of your beauty I would not leave your side". As we see more of him, a serious side emerges, an educated Muslim who sees a lot wrong with the West and not much with his own society, despite its inability to live in peace. This he blames on the West. However, the dialectic is sidelined by the plot line, which as suggested above, winds up on a Cuban beach.

The novel "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf was a pretty weird property, and Sally Potter produced a weird and wonderful movie from it. Her "Tango Lesson" was semi-autobiographical, well produced and absorbing. This movie is ambitious – "let's see if we can make a romantic comedy about the clash of civilizations and the meaning of life" and although visually fascinating it not surprisingly doesn't quite make it. It has its moments though – Maid Shirley Henderson's disquisitions on the nature of dirt to the camera, Sam Neil's guitar miming to an Eric Clapton number and the restaurant orgasm to name a few. Sally Potter still has the ability to find a different angle on existence.