Yes (2004)

About the Film by Sally Potter

I started writing YES in the days following the attacks of September 11th 2001 in New York City. I felt an urgent need to respond to the rapid demonisation of the Arabic world in the West and to the parallel wave of hatred against America.

I asked myself the question: so what can a filmmaker do in such an atmosphere of hate and fear? What are the stories that need to be told? Instinctively I turned to love and to verse (and to humour). Love, because it is ultimately a stronger force than hate; and verse, because its deep rhythms and its long tradition (from medieval sonnets to Icelandic sagas to rap) enable ideas to be expressed in lyrical ways that might otherwise be indigestible, abstract or depersonalised. (And humour, because in the face of such heavy global hysteria, the need for levity becomes stronger than ever.) And, whereas a documentary can explore the underlying historical and political issues, a work of fiction needs to venture into emotional terrain; the experiences we have in common, whatever our differences.

So I began writing an argument between two lovers, one a man from the Middle East (the Lebanon), the other a woman from the West (an Irish/American) at a point where their love affair has become an explosive war-zone, with the differences in their backgrounds starting to overshadow them as individuals. My job was to create two characters who are contradictory, complex, and sympathetic, with both strengths and weaknesses. I wanted to draw portraits that flow against the tide of cliché (particularly the stereotypes of the enemy ‘over there' and the potential ‘enemies within' - the exiles, immigrants and asylum-seekers living in the west. For this reason, also, the man's religion is left deliberately ambiguous.)

The argument between the two lovers came out onto the page, for the most part, in iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line). Perhaps my background as a lyricist made me write this way; as if the film was a song. Or perhaps it was an instinctive attempt to let the characters speak to each other on screen about things which are hard to express in normal conversation. Either way, I tried to find a form in which the characters could speak to each other from somewhere intimate and surprising in themselves.

The argument became a sequence which was then made, experimentally, as a five-minute short film. Excited by its possibilities I then decided to develop the two characters, their storyline, and the mosaic of lives around them, into a feature-length script. The sub-plots would include the woman's husband, a betrayed and betraying English politician; their god-daughter, a withdrawn teenager trying to grow up in a beauty and celebrity-obsessed culture; three kitchen hands, each battling with their beliefs and prejudices in the midst of the noise and confusion of the workplace; the heroine's aunt, trying to make sense of her life as it ebbs away; and a cleaner, functioning as a one-woman chorus who sees and hears it all. Each character would be caught in a different kind of solitude, each trying to reach out to those around them, each one trying to be heard.

In the screenplay the verse is like a river running through the film as we delve into the characters' thought-streams and back out into their speech. I had learnt from the five-minute film that the actors delivered the verse best, paradoxically, when they ignored it; when they spoke concentrating on the meaning, rather than the rhymes, as if the text was just a heightened form of ordinary speech. (For this reason many viewers of the film don't really notice its rhymes or its metre.)

The war in Iraq began as we began rehearsals; with Joan Allen and Simon Abkarian heading a fine, committed cast. Lines from the script became more and more pertinent, as the characters' journey accelerated. We all felt we were working on something urgently contemporary. During the working process we discussed the usual details of design, light and lens, or character and costume. But we also talked passionately about the deeper themes of the film; the struggle to understand each other (East and West, Christian and Muslim); the desire to respect each other's differences and to find a way of living side by side.

As world events overtook the story we had to cancel our shoot in Beirut (the war had made us un-insurable) and Joan Allen, an American citizen, could no longer work in Cuba (thanks to a new Bush administration decree). It took some fancy footwork to overcome these problems.

That the film was made at all is testimony to the ingenuity of the producers, Christopher Sheppard and Andrew Fierberg, and the dedication and generosity of the cast, crew, and facility houses who invested in the film with their unpaid labour or deferred fees to make it possible. It was truly a labour of love. Everyone wanted to contribute to a ‘yes' in the face of the destruction and despair of war.

All thanks are due also to GreeneStreet Films who were excited enough by the project to decide to finance the film along with The UK Film Council, in times when risk-taking in cinema is increasingly rare.

P.S. Some further Notes about the Film by Sally Potter

How can I describe YES? Is it a love story? It is certainly romantic, but it is also quite definitely political. And it is also funny, though you couldn't really call it a comedy.

It does have a plot (a love story) that respects the classic principle that there must be an obstacle to the lovers' union. She is married - but adultery is commonplace these days, so that would hardly count as an obstacle. What is less common is that the love affair is between an American woman and a Middle-Eastern man, so the obstacle is both cultural and political.

But perhaps what is most unusual is the way the story is told: the lovers (and all the other characters in the film) speak to each other in verse. However, just as the film is not really ‘about' its plot, neither is it a film ‘about' poetry. (The direction to the actors was to respect the meaning of the words but to ignore the rhymes. The metre was to function as an invisible ‘holding structure': present if you know about it, but not designed to be read self-consciously, or even to be heard, except subliminally.)

So where does that leave us? Trying to describe or analyse your own film is always difficult. The energy has all gone into making it (building it up); trying to write about it sometimes feels like pulling it down (taking it apart). In thinking about how to provide some useful words for this press-kit I found myself reading a letter by John Berger (novelist and screenwriter). He is thanked in the credits at the end of the film, not only for having read several drafts of the script whilst it was in development, but also for the inspiration he provides as a writer of political sensibility and integrity who also takes risks with form. After the first private screening of the completed film this is what he wrote:

"The film is about the rhyming of contradictions. The verse confirms this in a way I hadn't foreseen. The places, the locations, are like characters too. The cleaner makes us realise this - and the camera moves all the while around and in and through these places with the same caring curiosity as she has. She's like the camera-woman. If the places are characters, what is scene? The arena of world politics today is the scene - and above it the sky to which everyone, at one moment or another, prays."

In another part of the letter he referred to the structure of the narration and his experience of how it worked for him:

"The narration of YES proceeds, again and again, through glances to denouements (nakedness). This procedure applies to every character - to those in the background of the story and to those in front. And this stitching-and-finally-unfurling-narration derives, first, from the way each person is portrayed. And, then, it is picked up by the camera movements and the music. The nakednesses are always surprising. (As they are in life when the one looking is attentive. Dress renders us similar, nakedness renders each of us incomparable.)"

So, perhaps the film is about becoming naked - the human commonality beyond (behind? inside?) our cultural and political differences. It is also about the very small and the very large; from the micro world of molecular science, and the dirt observed by the cleaner; to the enormity of war; the giant clash of fundamentalisms, eastern and western.

And in between those two worlds - somewhere on the middle of the scale of the very small to the very large - lies the human body with its' desires, frailties, strengths, and, ultimately, mortality.

13.03.2005 / rm