I am not, as you might have gathered, an unabashed fan of rhyme & regular meter for their own sake in poetry. When it makes sense, when it adds to the poem, it can be terrific – I can think of poets who have used it well within the past half century, tho I could count them on the fingers of two hands. 99.99 percent of the time these hoary devices of bygone centuries simply pose a large red flag of incompetence, a sign that the writer is not paying attention either to language or the world. I have a new exhibit for my argument, tho curiously it’s not a poem at all but a film, Sally Potter’s Yes.

Yes is a film that asks the question “Can a wealthy American woman in a loveless marriage find happiness in an affair with a Lebanese kitchen worker?” and the title gives away Potter’s answer, albeit with more than a little inner angst & sturm und drang along the way. At one level – perhaps its innermost core – this is a classic women’s romantic movie, the archetypal Chick Flick, done however as an art film, with lots of crazy camera angles (no Hollywood headshots with overlit sitcom livingrooms here), a score that includes Phil Glass, Tom Waits and additional music by Fred Frith, with lead characters who have no names & an occasional comic narrator in the form of a maid, portrayed by Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle to Harry Potter fans). Virtually all of the dialog in this overly talky film (She, portrayed by Joan Allen, talks to God when filming herself with a video camera, He is the most eloquent man alive, even if the thickness of Simon Abkarian’s accent is intended to convey the recent acquisition of his English¹) is in rhyme & meter.

It takes, at most, five minutes to recognize what’s going on, metrically, after which it tends to drown out what is being said underneath it throughout the rest of the movie. He & She are having a huge argument in an underground parking garage, but the steady beat of the iambs hints at a deeper – deeply clunky – harmony underneath. He’s shouting into his cell phone in a bombed out Beirut – and it rhymes. The notes to this film at IMDB suggest that Potter wanted her cast not to think of Shakespeare but rap. Yet it sounds like bad A.E. Houseman or Miller Williams instead.

This device could have been used more effectively – think of how riveting it is when, in the middle of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, lines from Henry IV pop up amidst the street hustlers & druggies of Portland. But to reach this same level of intensity here, Potter would have had to have been far more sparing in her application of these treacly measures – perhaps limiting them to the one character who actually sounds like the language fits her, Shirley Henderson’s narrating maid. But casting the device throughout the entire film is like giving everyone in the audience a valium before viewing, it lends what follows an overall coating of irreality that makes you feel like you’re not watching a story, but rather the stylistic frou-frou overlaid on top of a tale that is hiding somewhere underneath. The result is a film in which the whole remains forever a jumble of unassimilated parts.

 

¹ Abkarian is a French actor of Armenian descent, which is what passes for Lebanese in this film. There’s a lot of faux reality effects here like that, such as with the Havana beach scene pictured above, which was shot in the Dominican Republic since Allen felt constrained by George Bush’s ban on travel to Cuba. Ironically, Abkarian’s Beirut neighborhood scenes were actually filmed in Havana. Go figure.