Sally
Potter’s Word of Wisdom
Ponying
up for the Toronto Film Festival — or any film festival
— can be like winning a Golden Ticket (hey, even grrl
culture pixies take time out for some Hollywood fun, especially
when it involves Johnny Depp in close proximity to chocolate
[and not even a hint of Juliette Binoche]). Goodies, goodies
everywhere — along with the occasional chewy treat
that hasn’t quite got it worked out and leaves you
feeling bloated and blue (see under The Heart Is Deceitful
Above All Things) — and no way of sharing the bounty.
And when a film is especially delicious — say, written
in gorgeous, witty iambic pentameter, and taking on every
salient political issue of the day through a blazing romance
between an Irish-American woman (note, woman, not girl)
and a Middle Eastern man — there’s every chance
that distributors will freak like it’s exploding candy,
and the film won’t make it onto the shelves. Er, screens.
My
favourite film of the festival, YES, was touch-and-go,
after a horrible review in industry rag Variety,
but Sony Picture Classics — who also distributed writer/director
Sally Potter’s previous films Orlando (1993),
The Tango Lesson (1996) and The Man Who Cried
(2000). But sweet, chocolatey goodness (we’re talking
Dufflet Pastries chocolate ganache here) is available for
all (in downtown Toronto at least, with screenings at the
Carlton and Canada Square) as of Friday 22nd
July, ten months since I first leapt from my scene at the
end of the screening, eyes blazing, reiterating the film’s
last word, "Yes!"
But
who is the Willy Wonka of this veritable chocoparadise?
Orlando sent audiences around the world swooning
in 1993, introducing a legion of new fans to Sally Potter,
who had already directed two films and a documentary series,
as well as performing as a composer and singer with Lindsay
Cooper and various feminist performance groups — once
even performing naked on an ice rink! When asked to sum
herself up, she said, "I feel I am an entertainer at
root — I like the word entertainer, by the way,"
perhaps appropriate for someone who was as much inspired
by her music-hall entertainer grandmother as by legendary
film-maker Michael Powell, who encouraged her early work.
How could I resist the chance to interview her? It was my
version of a Golden Ticket.
Abandoning
the chocolate metaphor entirely, it’s fair to say that
Sally Potter’s YES is a Golden Ticket,
not only for viewers, who get to revel in Alexei Rodionov’s
light-drenched, sparkling cinematography, but also for the
performers, who all found themselves working in entirely
new ways. Joan Allen, who plays She, the film’s central
character, actually has snot trailing from her nose when
she cries. OK, I know, sounds less than tasty, but think
about it: how many times have you seen someone actually
cry on film? My friend Sarah, who trained as an actor and
dancer, says that her test for a true actor is whether they
will allow themselves to look ugly — angry, grieving,
distorted with fear. Allen could never look ugly, but she
does look like she is crying, not like an actor pretending
to cry and worrying about her mascara.
I
asked Potter — who also wrote the screenplay and composed
the original instrumental score (in the past she has also
acted, sung, and choreographed for her films) — how
Allen found the shoot, which asked her to fall in love and
grieve at ten syllables a line. "She says that it was
one of the most important experiences of her professional
life," replies Potter, utterly without arrogance. Allen’s
dedication to publicity work for the film — attending
dozens of festival Q&As, and sharing media space with
Potter, as has male lead Simon Abkarian, who makes his English-language
debut in YES — indicates that there really was
something utterly compelling and fresh in the experience
of the film.
Potter
has long experience of working with actors. She has been
performing since her teens, and this translates into a unique
rapport with her cast. "I think [Joan] knew that she
was in very careful and very dedicated hands visually. And
I promised her, at the beginning, I said, you really don’t
have to think about how you look, I’m going to take
care of everything, I think that’s important. You need
to know whether somebody else is worrying about whether
you’ve got a piece of hair kind of sticking out of
your ear or something, so that you don’t fiddle and
fuss, so that you can go for the real meat of the scene
and work from the inside out knowing that you’re being
taken care of from the outside in."
Care
from the outside in is the film’s hallmark. You can
feel the camera thinking about every object and surface,
taking unusual angles. Potter attributes this visual intensity
partially to the effect of having a script in the heightened
language of poetry. "You can’t get lazy around
it. When you’re breaking into new territory all the
time, suddenly everything’s up for grabs. Well, if
they’re not talking in normal paragraphs, why should
we shoot at a normal angle." Her films have always
sought to ask what is normal, from Thriller, which
tells the story of the opera La Bohème backwards
to ask why women always have to die, to Orlando,
which offered — in the fabulous form of Tilda Swinton
— an allegory about living life at the limits of gender.
Unpredictability
balances precision, meaning that her films never become
arthouse truffles that look, and maybe smell, great, but
have a curiously bland taste. Forging new working methods
and walking boldly into political debates is, she says,
"scary and exciting at the same time. Scary because
I know whenever I’ve done something for a first time
it inevitably gets attacked from some quarters and I’m
not comfortable with the criticism thing, although I’ve
had it my whole working life, I ought to be used to it by
now." I find myself breathing an inner sigh of relief
at this point, having always been told to grow up and take
criticism on the chin. In fact, Potter’s sensitivity
is such that the critical savaging of her second film, The
Gold Diggers (1983), a musical starring Julie Christie
that feminist critic Patricia Mellencamp describes as a
potentially revolutionary film, caused her to withdraw all
prints from circulation.
But
critics don’t have the power to stop her. How many
other directors would make contact with a reviewer who trashed
them and offer them an interview? Potter did just that with
Scott Foundas, he of the vicious Variety review.
And she wrote about her complex feelings around the interview
in her blog. <http://www.yesthemovie.com/diary.jsp?id=2324&title=The%20critic%20and%20me>.
This is a woman who doesn’t seem scared of anything
— and, as we talk, I feel like I’m bursting with
the motivation and will to go and fulfil a dream. But she
doesn’t seem to take her courageous example for granted.
She is full of enthusiasm and gratitude for the fans who
post on her films’ message boards and come up to her
at screenings to offer their thanks and praise. "People
come up to talk to me and say this and it’s gratifying
because at the time you don’t know that’s the
case, often taking a risk is a very lonely place, taken
in solitude." Again, I’m nodding my head (not
so much at the international adulation part — but I
can hope, right?).
As
all aspiring writers and artists who read — and write
for — these pages know, it’s often money that’s
the problem. Even, it seems, for award-winning directors
(Orlando won twenty-five international awards, including
two Oscar nominations). "I’ve gotten rejected
by financiers many, many gazillions of times for things
that I wish to do and that’s often been extremely tough
to the point where I’ve felt that people were trying
to annihilate what I do — but it’s all worth it
if I manage to do it anyway despite the people who don’t
want me to, I make it, and some years later some stranger
comes up to me and says ‘I started making films because
of Orlando’ or ‘What you’ve done has encouraged
me to take risks in my life,’ and there’s a look
in the eyes of those people that’s kind of shining,
and very gratifying and sweet and touching, and good because
I didn’t have those people to go up to, or at least
didn’t have women to go up to." How could I not
look up to the woman who can analyse the metaphysics of
music in one breath, and use the word ‘gazillions’
in another?
So
there I sat, having my own "shining moment" with
one of my heroes, who describes her film-making practice
as "a kind of gypsy thing, a magpie thing, shiny stuff,"
hunting out projects that sparkle — but also reflect
back to us the world we live in. Talking about the decision
to write Joan Allen’s character as an embryologist
engaged in looking at the moment at which life begins ("They’re
just cells," She says in her head when a friend questions
her use of embryos in research, a bold statement as abortion
rights come under attack in the US and UK), Potter observes
astutely that "the notion of where life begins, which
is behind the abortion debate, which is completely related
to the question of where life ends, which is so hugely linked
in to most religious systems, the recent thing that came
up with Terry Schiavo — and I was in the States while
that was happening — you know, all those questions
intersect with faith. Faith and reason."
So
the film includes all these binaries: faith and reason,
life and death, East and West, male and female. There is
conflict, but also a resolution (how many documentaries
can claim that much?) that
suggests
we have to take all these things together, rather than separating
them into different disciplines and sides. Potter laughs,
"my own criticism of my work is that I’m always
tackling millions of things, and I would love it if I could
just for God’s sake just tackle one thing, but I haven’t
managed it yet," and continues seriously, "but
I do think that there’s a funny way in which the biggest
conflicts of our generation intersect, you can’t take
one out without implying the other." That generosity
of vision, of inclusion, of connection, is at the heart
of YES, expressed on the basic level of the pairing
of lines, one depending on the other for rhyme and thus
completion.
Inspired
by the film’s wisdom, I put one final question to Potter.
Many of her films delve into unconventional romantic/erotic
relationships, the kind that more and more people are entering
into. I was hoping that, as writer and director of YES,
which charts just such a relationship (the disintegration
of an open marriage, and the reintegration of self through
a sexual relationship with a quasi-stranger), Potter might
have a word for the other person — something beyond
lover, partner, squeeze, and all those other words that
seem so twentieth century. "There’s just connection,"
she says, after a thoughtful pause, "but you can’t
say this is my connection — we’re all connected.
There isn’t a word, and that’s just symptomatic
— I mean there are very old words, which offer the
possibility when put together of expressing all these nuances
which are otherwise hard to express."
For
review readers looking for an answer to the question, "Why
write a film in iambic pentameter?" you have it right
there. Nuance. Precision. Unpredictability. Connection.
Shining moments. These are the stuff of poetry in its attention
to language, its determination to push language and meaning
up against their limits. And, in case we forget, poetry
is also the realm of beauty, of linguistic pleasure. Potter,
who has been attacked by feminist and non-feminist critics
alike for the sumptuousness of her work, defies them with
her insistence on visual, aural, and sensual pleasure. "I
think the notion of pleasure is through the whole film,
and I wanted to give pleasure." YES asks: are
you ready to take it? I defy you not to say: YES.
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