The dialogue is poetic, the marriage is anything but in 'Yes'

It doesn't dawn on you right away - at least it didn't dawn on me - that the dialogue in Sally Potter's Yes is in iambic pentameter, rife with musical rhythms and rhyming couplets. From first word to last, the conversation - and the soulful soliloquies of Shirley Henderson, playing a melancholy housemaid who addresses the camera - bops along like pared-down Shakespeare.

But thanks to the considerable talents of Joan Allen, Sam Neill and Simon Abkarian, who give their all to this moody tale of marital infidelity, international politics, and the meaning of life, very little of the singsong of bad poetry makes its way onto the soundtrack. (A bit does: Some of Potter's verse is better, and some worse, like rhyming "desire" and "fire.") The actors work the words into conversational form, hitting invisible line-breaks that make the stanzas of the screenplay sound like everyday chatter - or almost.

It's that "almost" that hoists Potter's playlike construction out of the realm of a Lifetime soap. Despite highfalutin musings about dust particles, biology, God, and whatnot, Yes is essentially an adulterous relationship melodrama: a successful politician husband (Neill) and a successful biogeneticist wife (Allen) whose marriage is joyless, and the passionate stranger (Abkarian) who comes along and makes the missus feel things she hasn't felt forever.

Abkarian is He, a mustachioed Lebanese who was a surgeon in the old country, but now, in post-9/11 Britain, is reduced to hacking foodstuffs in a restaurant kitchen. Allen's She meets him at a dinner party where she's bored to death. She hands the tuxedoed line-cook, moonlighting as a waiter, her calling card.

He calls.

As Henderson's Cleaner (a one-woman Greek chorus) muses on about the revealing nature of bedsheet stains, He and She carry on an affair in bistros and hotels. Neill's character, inexplicably dubbed Anthony, reads his reports and listens to the blues (watch him get down and almost play air guitar to his B.B. King discs!). He keeps his emotions locked down - if he has any emotions, that is. He breaks down a bit and shares his woe with his cute, curvy goddaughter (Stephanie Leonidas), but he may have predatory motives for doing so.

Potter explores midlife ennui, (middle-)East-West tension, theology, biology and the irrational nature of romance in this ambitious, if ultimately sketchy, drama. Allen, who should get an Oscar for her performance earlier in the year in The Upside of Anger, relays complicated emotions with a light touch (even when she's weeping), and the scenery - with settings in London, New York and Havana - is swell.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea

at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.

Yes

*** (out of four stars)

Produced by Christopher Sheppard and Andrew Fierberg, written and directed by Sally Potter, cinematography by Alexei Rodionov, music by Potter, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

Running time: 1 hour, 39 mins.

She. . . Joan Allen

He. . . Simon Abkarian

Anthony. . . Sam Neill

Cleaner. . . Shirley Henderson

Parent's guide: R (profanity, sex, violence, adult themes)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ