I think it would be hard for anyone to enjoy following this film unless the revel in recognising rhyme in every other sentence for 90 minutes. And I am usually a sucker for pretentious films.
The plot of Yes entirely concerns an affair between a married Irish/ American/ English female geneticist and a Middle Eastern male surgeon-come-chef. They meet, they fall for each other, they then meet regularly, then they fall-out and then something at the end which really made whatever message it had been trying to portray a mixed bag. If that’s made you curious, don’t be; it’s a really standard plot. But that wasn’t what this film hinged on.
The dialogue is in iambic pentameter or poetry to you and me. For the first 10 minutes it was bearable, I think because the dialogue was broken up and made of few soliloquys unlike later on. But as it pulls itself through the running-time, the dialogue becomes more and more grating and alienating and it knows it; occasionally throwing in a “fuck you” to find a common parlance it knows it never had. It’s distracting and overbearing. What is meant to be aesthetically pleasing and meaningful is not. The incessant rhyming makes it sound like a juvenile, primary-school effort at poetry. But I do find most poetry difficult to access.
Joan Allen is a manically depressing presence on screen. Her character’s drooping face sucks happiness out of everything around her at black-hole-ish proportions. She thinks her life is shit which is fine but I never sympathised with her ennui. The person you relate to most is Shirley Henderson (best known as Moaning Myrtle from the Harry Potter series) despite her not being the main protagonist. She is the maid of the house and narrator of the story who begins and ends the film. We constantly feel like her, forced to witness the lives of these people, although she herself is tempted to ramble sometimes too.
Then the message of the film is all over the place after you have finished watching it. It plays with the ideas of indulgence and guilt which are constituent parts of the/any affair. But there are also references to the imperialism of the West, xenophobic suspicions and a pointless Communist Irish grandmother within this relationship. And that’s literally what they are: references in conversation, boring exposition of thought. As far as I could tell, one of the reasons the couple rowed and stopped seeing each other was the man’s distaste for Western society: “we (the East and West) are at war.” The end was a twist for me as the moral of the story suddenly skewed in an unpleasantly optimistic direction. That was really out of the blue. On top of all that it has aged badly with jarring slow-motion edits, Gareth Gates haircuts and over-used jingoistic soundtracks to evoke orientalism and the Middle East.
Waste of time? Yes 1/5 - A loose, pretentious effort.
The plot of Yes entirely concerns an affair between a married Irish/ American/ English female geneticist and a Middle Eastern male surgeon-come-chef. They meet, they fall for each other, they then meet regularly, then they fall-out and then something at the end which really made whatever message it had been trying to portray a mixed bag. If that’s made you curious, don’t be; it’s a really standard plot. But that wasn’t what this film hinged on.
The dialogue is in iambic pentameter or poetry to you and me. For the first 10 minutes it was bearable, I think because the dialogue was broken up and made of few soliloquys unlike later on. But as it pulls itself through the running-time, the dialogue becomes more and more grating and alienating and it knows it; occasionally throwing in a “fuck you” to find a common parlance it knows it never had. It’s distracting and overbearing. What is meant to be aesthetically pleasing and meaningful is not. The incessant rhyming makes it sound like a juvenile, primary-school effort at poetry. But I do find most poetry difficult to access.
Joan Allen is a manically depressing presence on screen. Her character’s drooping face sucks happiness out of everything around her at black-hole-ish proportions. She thinks her life is shit which is fine but I never sympathised with her ennui. The person you relate to most is Shirley Henderson (best known as Moaning Myrtle from the Harry Potter series) despite her not being the main protagonist. She is the maid of the house and narrator of the story who begins and ends the film. We constantly feel like her, forced to witness the lives of these people, although she herself is tempted to ramble sometimes too.
Then the message of the film is all over the place after you have finished watching it. It plays with the ideas of indulgence and guilt which are constituent parts of the/any affair. But there are also references to the imperialism of the West, xenophobic suspicions and a pointless Communist Irish grandmother within this relationship. And that’s literally what they are: references in conversation, boring exposition of thought. As far as I could tell, one of the reasons the couple rowed and stopped seeing each other was the man’s distaste for Western society: “we (the East and West) are at war.” The end was a twist for me as the moral of the story suddenly skewed in an unpleasantly optimistic direction. That was really out of the blue. On top of all that it has aged badly with jarring slow-motion edits, Gareth Gates haircuts and over-used jingoistic soundtracks to evoke orientalism and the Middle East.
Waste of time? Yes 1/5 - A loose, pretentious effort.