YES Joan and Simon try to decide/Whether to struggle with their cultural divide.

Quixotic filmmaker Sally Potter (Orlando, The Tango Lesson) returns to form with this luminous tale of love as metaphor that’s set in London, Belfast, Beirut, and Havana and written in rhyming couplets (which some viewers apparently never notice). Joan Allen is the Irish-American woman trapped in a cold, dull marriage to Sam Neill; English stage actor Simon Abkarian is the Lebanese waiter (formerly a surgeon) who seduces her. Their affair goes supernova, and they struggle with their cultural divide. Meanwhile housekeeper Shirley Henderson (Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself) narrates the action while philosophizing about dirt. Potter calls Yes a meditation on September 11, and that sounds hopelessly ambitious, a sort of L’année dernière à Marienbad writ large for a globally cynical audience. The first shot is even an anonymous swirl of dust motes. But Potter’s visual textures are jaw-dropping, and the lofty language — distracting at first, perhaps — seems plucked from the sky like perfectly ripe fruit.