Definite ‘Yes’
Potter’s Post-9/11 Call for Tolerance Demolishes Clichés
by Ky Nguyen
British filmmaker Sally Potter (“Orlando,” “The Man Who Cried,” “The Tango Lesson”) spoke with The Washington Diplomat about “Yes”—a story inspired by the events of 9/11.
Potter explained, “I started writing on 9/12. As a filmmaker, I had to try and contribute something in a global atmosphere of increasing hatred, fear and misunderstanding, and stereotypes from both sides of the world. The Middle East was becoming really demonized, and so was America in the reverse sense. So I decided to make a love story in which some of those clichés would be demolished.”
In the film, an Irish-American woman (Joan Allen), a scientist in a stifling marriage, has a passionate affair with a Lebanese man (Simon Abkarian), a former surgeon now struggling as a dishwasher in the United States. The characters are credited only as She and He.
“What a film can do is you can personalize that so it’s not like a newspaper article. It’s two individuals in love. And it’s a universal phenomenon,” Potter said. “Right now, it’s the Middle East and the West, but in the past, it was the Cold War with Russia and America.”
Like Shakespeare, the characters speak in iambic pentameter. Potter observed, “It’s a very natural way of expressing ideas, in the English language at least. Some people say that the rhythm of iambic pentameter is close to the rhythm of thought or of breath. It’s kind of like breathing thought. Paradoxically, it’s the only way to integrate a lot of ideas in a natural flowing way, because in normal everyday speech, we tend to speak more or less in sentences or paragraphs.
“But when you write in verse, you can weave lots and lots of ideas together in a flowing way, which I guess is why it’s one of the very oldest literary forms—perhaps the oldest—and, of course, the newest: in rap and hip hop. That is exactly what young artists are discovering with verse—that they can integrate lots of levels of experience into the writing: politics, personal life, loss, love… The whole lot can come into a quite short space,” the director explained.
“The biggest ideas are there in the general philosophy of the film: being about impermanence and the constant changing state of all things. And a kind of relationship with karma where what you do leaves a trace in the world, and it comes back to you in some sense. We’re all interdependent beings. That’s loosely speaking a good part of the Buddhist philosophy, which doesn’t consider itself a religion but a philosophy.”
Miranda July: Expression on Film
Filmmaker magazine ranked American writer-director-actress Miranda July number one in their “25 New Faces of Indie Film 2004” article—and that was half a year before her feature debut ever played. It helps to be an internationally acclaimed video-performance artist and writer with work in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial and galleries around the globe.
“Me and You and Everyone We Know” creates a fantastical world in which interconnected characters say and act on what they’re thinking. Premiering at Sundance 2005, it won a Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision. At Cannes, July took home four awards: the Caméra d’Or (Best First Film), Critics Week Grand Prize, Prix Regards Jeune (Best Feature) and Young Critics Award.
Before her whopping success at Cannes, The Washington Diplomat interviewed July before she presented a screening at Filmfest DC. For an established performer, July seemed quite shy initially, but she grew more at ease as the interview progressed.
Similarly, she described what she gained from workshops at the Sundance Labs: “Mostly, it’s the experience, the comfort talking about ideas, and just the confidence really. So that when I actually went and shot it, it wasn’t the first time I ever woke in the morning and thought, ‘I’m shooting a scene from this movie.’”
Although July views film as just another medium, she admitted, “It’s different in all of the obvious ways from performance or writing a short story or recording. Technically and logistically, much harder than all of those things. It costs so much more. You have to sustain the idea and the energy for so much longer.”
July is ready to take a break from cinema. “There’s a handful of projects that I want to make: a book of short stories, a CD and a performance. I would love to at least get to do some of them before I make another movie because movies are so all-consuming that you can sort of kiss goodbye two years of your life.”
Ky N. Nguyen is the film reviewer for The Washington Diplomat.
