SOME GREAT THINGS COME IN SIMPLE PACKAGES : "YES"

Now, here’s another great British director I had never heard of. I didn’t quite know what to expect when I read the DVD sleeve for this film; a response to the negative sentiments post 9 /11, the DVD cover said, the love story between an English /American married woman and an Arab doctor who has emigrated to the UK and now works as a chef to get by. O-oh I thought to myself, hankies at the ready, this is bound to be melodramatic. Needless to say it was. But not in a “bad” way. One really has to try and not be tricked by appearances. An original director like Sally Potter can do wonders to even the most banal sounding story.
Ok, so the basic storyline I have, in fact, given away in the first paragraph. She is a married woman. She has a successful career of her own and her husband is a politician. They seem to have everything they need, but in fact their marriage is crumbling. Their lives have grown almost completely apart. It is at this point He, an Arab surgeon, an educated and cultured man who has been reduced by circumstances to working as a chef in a restaurant, enters her life quite by chance. She is attracted, at first by His exoticism, he is after all from the mystical Middle-East, and he has a whole different perspective on most things in life. But as the relationship deepens, another kind of exoticism begins to attract her. The novel feeling of truly loving and being loved in return.
Like I said. The story itself smacks of melodrama. It is, however, the way this love is portrayed that makes Potter’s film truly extraordinary. The film is, for example, characterized by direct to camera narration and long monologues. Potter adds to the distanciation already created by making her characters talk in rhyme, like a Shakespeare play, not prose. This may seem odd, especially since the film relies very heavily on monologues but it does, in fact make sense. The film is deeply, deeply philosophical. Yes 9 / 11 does come into it – how can it not at this point, it has, on a level, changed pretty much the entire plant – but that’s not just it. Potter has filled the film with poignant observations and reflections on life. She is deeply sensitive to the normally “unexplored” parts of life and it is possibly because I loved and agreed with this philosophy so much that the film has become one of my all-time favorites. It is around this point that that sense of distance that I was mentioning comes into play. If we were to try and “engage” (you know, enter into) and identify with the film and characters too much, perversely, this would make the long monologues hard to follow. Interest would wane. You would get bored and not listen to half the things said. But since you are kind of watching “from the outside” already, and since there are other little idiosyncrasies – such as the use of rhyme – that make us truly pay attention to the film, you cannot help but listen to the philosophy and reflect on it as well. After all, it is this “from the outside” attitude that helps us reflect on films, we don’t do that much thinking if we are completely engaged, we rely more on feelings. But here, we do a whole lot of thinking. And as we think, if we find ourselves agreeing with Potter’s philosophy and take on life, well… Fandom of the film just comes of its own accord. I really, really must encourage you to give this one a whirl. It is original, it is definitely not what you are used to, but by God, if it’s your thing you are going to thank your lucky stars you sat down to watch it… One of my personal favorites of all times, for sure.