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THE
YES MEN
7/10
USA
2003 : Chris SMITH, Dan OLLMAN, Sarah PRICE : 80 mins
Shot on grainy
hand-held video then blown up to 35mm for cinema-screen projection, you'd
never call The Yes Men very pretty to look at. And the mirror it
holds up to the modern world isn't very flattering, either: the immediate
targets are corporate capitalism in general and the World Trade Organisation
(WTO), but the problems diagnosed go much deeper and wider. Deeper and
wider even than those pinpointed by the likes of Morgan Spurlock and Michael
Moore (who appears here) in their recent documentaries, although
the humour here is closer to British TV groundbreakers like Chris Morris
and Ali G.
The Yes Men
are a shadowy, US-based group of satirical activists who set up a website
spoofing the WTO's own online presence a couple of years ago. Amazingly,
they soon started getting invitations from people thinking they were
the WTO. Sensing a potential opportunity, they played along, turning
up at various conferences and symposiums to deliver outrageous comments
under the WTO banner. They discovered that, no matter how shocking their
statements, they would be accepted without demur or question by their
audiences. The Yes Men follows a handful of such activities, principally
a presentation in Finland which featuring an especially imaginative and
spectacular 'display.' It's remarkable to see these ludicrous suggestions
accepted at face value by dozens of educated, intelligent people who really
should know a lot better (although the traditions of Scandinavian respect
and politeness also probably played a part.)
On one level,
The Yes Men - which builds from a slightly shaky, woolly start
- is easily one of the year's funniest films, with the computer-generated
simulations projected during the presentations are the riotous highlights.
But even as we're laughing, we realise that the fundamental import is
chillingly serious. As someone bluntly asks in bemused exasperation, "What
can't they get away with?" in a world which all too often
follows Margaret Thatcher's instruction to her policy chiefs of "thinking
the unthinkable."
The Yes Men
stands in a proud lineage of savage irony that stretches back at least
as far as Jonathan Swift, whose deadpan 'A Modest Proposal' (1729) advocated
the eating of babies as a solution to problems of overpopulation and hunger.
The closest The Yes Men come to this Swiftian horror is a pseudo-WTO scheme
in which the excrement of Western burger-eaters is recycled back into
Big Macs for developing-world markets - a scheme so foul that it's (eventually)
spotted as a hoax by an audience of high-schoolers (experiencing what
may well be the most valuable lesson of all.) This is, in what's in some
ways a somewhat depressing film, a welcome ray of optimism, as it suggests
that future generations may not be quite so ready to swallow the corporate
line as their parents and grandparents. 'Question authority' is the basic
message - not that you should take my word at face value, of course...
6th December,
2004
[seen 13th November : Cankarjev Dom, Ljubljana, Slovenia : public show
: Ljubljana
International Film Festival]
Check out
more reviews from Ljubljana International Film Festival here
by Neil
Young
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