“YES”- The title of the film is as broad as the themes existing in it.
The film’s opening scene with the picture of a half naked man and a woman made me speculate whether the film would be like the feminist films we have been viewing in class that left me feeling empowered as a woman or will it deal with gender relationships in a neutral manner.
As the story progressed, I soon realized that the film has motifs of love, religion, sex, ethnicity, war, cultural differences, life and death running parallel to each other.
The film deals with a cross-cultural love affair which seems to be a common storyline for the contemporary cinema, but what distinguishes it from other films is the plot structured by director Sally Potter in a peculiar way.
The narrative is presented in the form of iambic pentameter. The characters utter rhyming verses instead of typical dialogues. The poetry is avant-garde and exudes from the tongues of the characters as flawlessly and naturally as water gushes from a waterfall.
The story progresses in the form of a song. The characters are panoptic, ranging from a woman stuck in a loveless marriage to a housemaid who slickly shares her philosophy about dirt.
The main characters are a woman named “She” and a man named “He”. She is an Irish-American scientist who is unhappily married to a British politician while “He” is a Lebanese surgeon, who is in exile in London and works as a cook.
The characters are not given specific names because the director wants them to be one of us and make us feel related to them.
The identity of the characters is ambiguous and they seem to be wrapped in layers of personas.
“He” is a doctor, a cook, a religious adherent (Muslim or Christian as Lebanon is half- Muslim half-Christian), a lover, a friend and a good dancer. “She” is a scientist, an American, an Irish, a Christian, a mother, a wife, a lover and a friend. All these different personas of the characters make them appear exclusive and bourgeois at the same time and help different people relate to them in their own capacity.
Apart from the housemaid, the film shows three other cleaners in the pool, the lab and the hospital. It is not a co-incidence that they are all women. They all turn their impassive face directly to the camera and make one wonder if they know the reality of what’s going on.
There is certainly an expression of male-dominance in the film. After engaging in a blissful sexual experience, He compares himself to sun, the source of light and She to moon, which basks in the light of the sun.
He also suggests that she is a disloyal wife engaging in extra-marital sex and it is possible that she might be fucking other men behind his back. His talk that no female body tempts him and He finds She to be unclean and distracting were signs of patriarchal mentality. I was kind of surprised why She was being apologetic rather than being defensive but this can be because the director wanted to focus on the political debate rather than a feminist one.
After being kicked out from the restaurant because of an argument about religious and political differences, He sees a Christmas decoration in the street. The statue of Mary and Jesus are white but the man behind them is slightly darker. This makes He conscious of his immigrant status because of his skin color.
The film deals with the issue of growing antagonism of Islam in the west and the increasing abhorrence of west in the Arab world. The confrontation between He and She regarding Islam and West, America and oil, and the war-on-terror were defining aspects of the story. The confrontation scene is remarkable as it unfolds the religious and political baggage from both sides.
It showed that culture and nationalities instead of love defined their relationship now. It shows bitter political discussion between two individuals but is in fact referring to the contemporary international political debate between nations. The stereotypical slangs like terrorist, imperialist, bigot and bitch are thrown in a very flimsy manner which gradually leads to the acceptance of conflicting world views.
Like the rhyming verses and the soft sounds, the camera angles in the film also have a language. There was an apparent symmetry in scenes featuring She and her husband. To suggest the emotional and physical distance between them, the screen was always divided in two parts. There was use of surveillance cameras in some scenes which made one feel like a voyeur.
A “low angle shot” is used in the beginning when “She” is going to her office and receives a call from “He”. She obviously says “Yes” to his proposal and the camera is shooting up on her with the sky in the background which makes her appear powerful and dominant.
The use of colors is comprehensive and creates distinction between two different worlds. In the world of “He”, the colors are warm, bright hues of reds and oranges. This gives a very romantic and magical effect and is in complete harmony with the charismatic, voluptuous and sensual personality of He.
There is very minimal use of colors in the world of “She”. Her world is mostly white and gives a hint to her mechanical and cold life.
The film is definitely an auditory treat. He, with his magical articulation and florid speech, gives the already animate poetry more life and creates gratification.
The silky recitation of the poem by She’s grandmother in her death bed provides wisdom from a different perspective.
The variation in the music from Middle-Eastern to Spanish adds an exotic flavor to this story dealing with cross-cultural affairs. The Lebanese dance and the blues music create equilibrium between the two worlds.
It is difficult to describe if the film is more visual or acoustic. The delicate balance between the various sounds in the film from the highly expressive verses to the exotic music and the silence of the characters while engaging in mind talk, suggest it to be an aural masterpiece. But at the same time, the camera angles, the use of a wide range of colors and strikingly artistic visuals make it an ocular delight.
At the end of the film, the house-maid says, “In fact I think I'd guess that "no" does not exist, there's only "yes" ”. This remark conveys the essence of the film that stimulates us to say YES to love, YES to new challenges in life, YES to the acceptance of differences, YES to new hopes, YES to a peaceful coexistence, and to say YES to celebrate every joy in our short life.