A FILM IN VERSE?/ COULD BE WORSE

REVIEWED- YES: IN THE week of the release of Guy Ritchie's insufferable Revolver, it seems churlish to accuse any film, even one whose characters speak entirely in verse, of preciousness. But Sally Potter's naively schematic romance will surely try the patience of even those who most loudly applaud its commendable ambition.

Touching upon questions of biology and politics, Yes details the relationship between an Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese doctor (Simon Abkarian), now working as a chef in London. The scientist is married to a snooty English politician (Sam Neill), whose vulgarity is unsubtly conveyed by having him play air guitar to bar-room blues when left alone. Abkarian's character spends his days bickering with those who seek to treat him as an exotic seer or a potential terrorist.

Potter's thinking seems to be that, in its formality and unreality, the iambic pentameter allows the discussion of big, esoteric ideas, less accommodating to naturalistic dialogue. Well, maybe. But the effect is also to distance us from the characters and to render some of their musings utterly preposterous. "I was a doctor with a knife/Who cut the flesh to save a life," Abkarian says, unintentionally paying tribute to the legendarily dreadful Scottish versifier, William McGonagall.

Elsewhere, Allen, whose resolutely un-Northern Irish character is under the delusion that she is from Belfast, is unkindly asked to offer a poetic eulogy to the potato and the way our devotion to that vegetable speaks of the continuing impact of the Famine. It sounds even more preposterous in verse.

All that said, Potter, the director of Orlando and The Man Who Cried, is to be praised for attempting something so novel with the medium. The film's hits - among them Shirley Henderson's fine turn as an all-seeing cleaning woman - may be outnumbered by its misses, but those failures are all honourable ones.