‘PEOPLE WERE MORE AFRAID OF THE POETRY’: Sally Potter’s
east-meets-west movie features an English pot-washer hurling abuse at
‘Arab bombers’. Did such topicality worry its backers? No – but the
rhyming dialogue got them really scared. Duncan Campbell repo
The Guardian – United Kingdom; Jul 29, 2005
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
When Sally Potter started writing the screenplay for Yes on September
12 2001, she can little have imagined the grim timeliness of its
opening in London. The new film by the director of Orlando deals with
that angry gulf between west and east that lay behind the attacks on
both New York and London. At the film’s heart is a love affair between
an Irish-American scientist (played by Joan Allen) and a refugee
Lebanese surgeon (Simon Abkarian) who can find work only as a cook in
Britain.
At the centre of the affair is the imbalance between the wealthy,
guilty westerner and the angry, disenfranchised Middle Easterner, who
is forced by his refugee status to use his surgical skills to slice
aubergines rather than abdomens. There are below-stairs tensions with
his fellow kitchen staff. In one scene he is berated by an angry
English washer-up: “This country’s full of wankers dressed in sheets/
Asylum fucking seekers in our streets/ And taking all our fucking
jobs. Arab wanks!/ And then what do they do to give us thanks?/ They
fucking blow us up!”
And if backers for the film were nervous about the politics it
presented, they were even more concerned about the form of the script:
it is written entirely in iambic pentameters, from an opening
soliloquy on dirt by the couple’s cleaner (played by Shirley
Henderson, a one-woman Greek chorus with a J-cloth) to the final
scenes in the Caribbean.
“People were much more afraid of the iambic pentameters than the
politics which are relatively oblique, because there is deliberately
no overt message or actual event,” says Potter. It is in verse, she
said, because “it just came out that way” and she instructed her
actors to “ignore the rhyme, ignore the form, just concentrate on the
sense and the emotion”. James Joyce, the last word of whose novel
Ulysses gives the film its title, also played a part. “I wanted to
find some cinematic equivalent to the stream of consciousness.”
Yes was made for around pounds 1m, which included pounds 450,000 from
the UK Film Council, a tiny budget given the location shoots and
high-profile cast, who along with the crew worked for partially
deferred payments – which means they get fully paid only when the film
makes money. This shortage of funds has led to Potter having to play a
large part in a shoestring marketing operation, from writing a blog
about its progress to appearing at countless question-and-answer
sessions with audiences at festivals and openings. Often she has been
accompanied by Allen or Abkarian, a Paris-based Armenian actor from
Beirut whom Potter met and was impressed by five years ago when she
was casting for her previous film, The Man Who Cried. She has already
taken Yes to half a dozen countries, including Turkey, the US and
Mexico, and once it has opened in Britain she will be off with it
under her arm to Japan and Romania.
One of the points Potter says she wanted to make is that Americans are
often seen in monolithic stereotypical terms just as Muslims and
Middle Easterners are. “I wanted to dismantle stereotypes of all
kinds. The British can be quite casual with their anti-Americanism
without realising how divided the country is. I was very struck during
my last trip to see how much opposition there was to the Patriot Act
and to feel the real atmosphere of fear in the air. People said that
they were living in an atmosphere where it was increasingly difficult
to speak out in opposition to the war.”
But what has perhaps made most waves in the US, where the film opened
last month, has been the choice of Cuba as the place which Allen’s
character is told by her aunt to visit: “Castro . . . gave us hope/He
did. Oh, yes; he’s better than the Pope.”
“Going to Cuba was certainly seen as provocative,” said Potter. In
fact, Cuba’s part in the film prompted its own political
lesson. Because President Bush has banned Americans from visiting the
island, Joan Allen was advised by her lawyers that she could face a
heavy fine if she joined the shoot there, so her scenes had to be shot
in the nearby Dominican Republic and cut into the Cuban
footage. Havana also doubles as Beirut as the original plans for
location shooting there had to be abandoned because insurers refused
cover following the outbreak of the war in Iraq. Potter’s position has
not, however, prevented the film from being held by some US critics to
be anti-American.
It arrives in London trailing effusive plaudits from such heavyweights
as John Berger and Michael Ondaatje, but critics in the US have tended
either to love or hate it. Roger Ebert found it “erotic beyond
description . . . it contains politics that are provocative even if
you find them wrong-headed and has ever a movie loved an actress more
than this one loves Joan Allen?”. In the New York Times, A O Scott was
unimpressed and found: “This wants to be a movie about love, hate,
class, religion, ethnicity, science and the fractious state of the
modern world – but rather than expanding our sense of what it all
means, Potter shrinks it down to a single syllable. Tempting as it is
to contradict her yes with a simple no, other responses also come to
mind. And? So? What?”
While the critics may differ, Potter said that she had found the
dozens of audiences with whom she has now watched it to be remarkably
receptive. “I’ve always travelled with the films because I want the
audience to be my teacher so that I can learn for the next one,” said
Potter. “But I have never had the sort of feedback that I’ve had with
Yes. In Turkey, which was the first place where the audience was
predominantly Muslim, the fact that there was a sympathetic Middle
Eastern man in a main part was a news story, because it was such a
rarity. The response there was very much more populist than in America
– we were even in the Turkish Hello!”
Certainly, Turkish celebrity magazines are a strange destination for
one of this country’s most courageous but underestimated film
directors. Potter left school as a 16-year-old determined to become a
film-maker and her earliest work was in the early 1970s with the
London Film-makers Co-op, one of the most experimental and innovative
outfits of the time. But she then changed direction and trained as a
dancer at the London School of Contemporary Dance, later becoming a
co-founder of the Limited Dance Company. A period in performance art,
with the actor Rose English, followed, alongside her work as a
composer with such bands as FIG and the Film Music Orchestra. Those
different skills all came together when she acted, danced and created
the score for The Tango Lesson in 1997, but her first film, Thriller,
a deconstruction of La Boheme, was made more than quarter of a century
ago in 1979. Her first feature, The Gold Diggers, came four years
later.
The first time I met her, more than 20 years ago, she was directing a
night shoot outside the Bank of England in the City which involved
besuited men carrying gold bars on their shoulders in a scene from The
Gold Diggers, another film that fitted no accepted mould and had an
all-woman crew. Her film-making has always been defiantly original and
she has, she said, now become used to being described as
“pretentious”. She had her greatest critical success with Orlando in
1992, starring Tilda Swinton.
“Everything is now doubly relevant,” said Potter of the London
bombings and the film. “Everything has come much closer to home.” In
one scene in Yes, Abkarian angrily tells Allen: “You think you know it
all, that you’re the best/ One life of yours worth more than all the
rest” – lines that this week made Potter think of the media coverage
of the dead in London compared to the simultaneous suicide bombings in
Baghdad which claimed 10 times as many lives in the week following the
July 7 attacks.
Last week, Charles Moore, writing in The Spectator about the London
bombings, reflected that “after last week’s events, there can be few
white couples with children in London who have not at least considered
moving out”. Potter’s film represents the opposite response to that
fearful negativity and it is unlikely there will ever be a more
relevant time to see it.
Yes opens on August 5.