Yes

Listening to the rhyming lines is all part of the thrill with Simon Abkarian and Joan Allen in Yes.

Herald rating: * * * * *

Greeted by enormously hostile reviews in the New York Times and the trade papers, among others, the new film by the most formally innovative of British film-makers is not for all tastes, it must be said. It is intensely stylised, not least because it is written almost entirely in rhyming iambic pentameter, the five-beats-to-a-line couplets that we normally associate with Shakespeare. But it's a bold and daring work in its technique and subject matter - it distills the present global standoff between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds into a highly charged love story.

It would be interesting to see how the film sounded to a viewer unaware of the script's versification (which slips the occasional four-beat line in, to chop up the rhythm for dramatic effect). It would probably seem the way it does anyway, as a heightened, hyper-real form of dialogue.

As it is, it is hard not to keep listening for the rhymes even when the words flow easily, as often they do. That's apt because, as Potter has said, this is "a film about learning to really listen" and the effect of our close listening is giddily entrancing even when the lines verge on the banal, as occasionally happens.

Potter began writing the movie the day after September 11, though the recent conflagration about the Danish cartoons has lent it added punch. What initially resulted was a five-minute short, which survives as an argument between the lovers in a car park and is the best scene in a film full of great ones. But it has expanded into a full-length feature that is provocative, evocative and mesmerisingly watchable.

The film's lovers (Allen, terrific as always, and Abkarian) are never named - in script and credits they are just He and She. She, an American geneticist, is stuck in a loveless marriage to Anthony (an excellent Neill), a cynical, philandering politician, until she meets He, an immigrant Lebanese surgeon working as a chef.

Their relationship flares quickly and burns intensely - the scenes of passion, particularly a clandestine, under-the-table groping in a cafe, are dizzyingly hot.

But the cultural divide between them yawns wide as she, Irish-born and a woman, finds herself thrust into competition with him as to who is the greater victim and who the more culpable perpetrator in the endless cycle of global oppression.

It is a pungent and challenging storyline through which Potter - courtesy of Henderson's wonderful Greek chorus of a housekeeper - weaves meditations on class, capitalism, heredity, feminism and love.

If that sounds worthy and dull, it's not meant to, because the film is a work of artistry whose effortlessness belies its artifice. If you don't like Shakespeare and haven't read poetry since high school, the chances are you'll hate it. But it is moving, striking and original and bound to be in my top 10 of the year.

CAST: Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, Sam Neill, Shirley Henderson DIRECTOR: Sally Potter RUNNING TIME: 95 mins RATING: R16, Offensive language SCREENING: Rialto