'Yes' I said yes I will yes

Sally Potter's 'Yes' stood tall and defiant in a field of two dozen masterpiece wannabes at Telluride in September, and Sony Pictures Classics wisely picked up distribution rights to it recently. Its release is scheduled for June 24, a date that might KO any other serious drama's chances for big box office and critical praise. But as I told producer Christopher Sheppard in Telluride, this film will have legs for two reasons: 1) Joan Allen gives the greatest performance of her career, and the notices will propel people to see it. 2) 'Yes' is the type of risky, guns-a-blazing, ambitious opus that has become extinct in movies in the last 15 years. Potter employs cleaning ladies as a defacto Greek chorus, rhyming couplets as dialogue, and a story that aspires to the emotional scope of James Joyce's "Ulysses," all under the guise of a 21st-century domestic drama. Watch for it, read nothing more about it, then see it. It'll be a shot of oxygen in a suffocating summer.