Betrayal, lust and love

Sally Potter, as audacious as ever, has written the screenplay of Yes, a sometimes bitter and occasionally sweet romance, in iambic verse. But don't let that put you off: her fine cast speak it so naturally that it seldom grates and you can ignore it altogether without missing much.

What you cannot ignore is the skill with which Yes is made. Despite what could have been a cramping budget, Potter has fashioned a beautiful-looking film (with excellent music, some composed by her) that focuses not only on love and its joys and disappointments, but on cultural and social politics, too.

The central characters are a Lebanese cook (Simon Abkarian) who falls for an American woman (Joan Allen) struggling in a desperate marriage with Sam Neill's English politician. They have a furious affair that is interupted by their arguments over the divisions of the post-9/11 world.

For the cook, who was once a doctor, working in Britain is like being a permanent interloper in an often hostile environment, which his mistress, despite her liberal inclinations, is a part of. No wonder he wants to return to his home country.

As a vulnerable woman at the end of her tether, Allen's performance is subtle and convincing. She is virtually saved by her lover, and she shows it in many different ways. Dried up by her marriage, she blossoms, and then shrinks again as he reluctantly rejects her.

There is a kind of Greek chorus in the maid (Shirley Henderson), who is obsessed by her cleaning, and by the dirt, germs and viruses which seem to mirror the world at large; and in the cook's kitchen, where a black Briton, a Scot and a young dishwasher continue the argument about jihad, racism and troubles that now seem even more pertinent than when the film was written, directly after 9/11.

At times over-directed, as if Potter is trying to be original at all costs, this is still one of her most mature and intelligent films, probing both inside and outside the lives of its characters.

Yes
Cert: 15