"Yes": Tweed skirts, white walls, hot sex and Shakespeare's rhyme/It's dazzling, yes -- but dies before its time
Sally Potter's new film "Yes" shouldn't possibly work. This isn't just a quasi-experimental post-9/11 message movie; it isn't even a post-9/11 message movie that's also a highbrow erotic romance. It's those things and it's written almost entirely in iambic pentameter, the rhythm associated with classic English verse and, more specifically, with a certain well-known Elizabethan playwright.

Hardly anybody besides Potter, the feminist polymath of British cinema, would have tried this -- in fact, the only filmmaker I can think of whose sensibility might be in this range is Peter Greenaway, Potter's misanthropic evil twin. The characters played by long-necked, long-legged Joan Allen and soulful, dignified Simon Abkarian have no names; they both live in London, and we gather that she's an Irish-American scientist and he's a Lebanese surgeon turned cook. She's unhappily married to a British diplomat and he's -- well, we never find out much about him, despite the film's good intentions. I guess he has the kinds of deep secrets swarthy romantic heroes must have.

As they progress from a chance meeting at a fancy dinner (she's dining; he's working) to adulterous passion, these two don't spend much time in anything we can recognize as the real world. Oh, there are shops, restaurants, parks and other familiar spaces, but Potter's interiors are nearly empty geometric planes in brilliant whites or subdued earth tones, almost abstract in their intensity. She has a reputation as a cerebral filmmaker, but that's not fair; she has a tremendous feeling for the sensuous nature of the medium, and for the most part "Yes" buzzes with visual life and imagination.

I'm not surprised that Potter's iambic verse is arch and witty, often tightly wound with hidden meanings and imaginative half rhymes -- especially as spoken by Shirley Henderson, the irrepressible British comic who provides running commentary in the role of Allen's housecleaner. ("There's no such thing as nothing, not at all/It may be really very, very small/But it's still there. In fact I think I'd guess/That 'no' does not exist. There's only 'yes.'")

What is surprising, though, is how well Potter's poetry works as movie dialogue. Quoting her lines out of context doesn't really work, but Potter has made the paradoxical discovery (well understood by all English-language poets before the 20th century) that formal strictures can liberate ideas, and her actors respond to this with brio. At least until Potter really turns her attention to the film's predictable political message, "Yes" is inexpressibly invigorating, like finding a cool, clear stream where you expected a brackish, tepid backwater.

Allen herself has something of that effect, and if my reaction is obvious it's nonetheless real: You hardly ever get to see erotic roles for women her age -- and when you do, it knocks your socks off. Allen is of course a beautiful and distinguished actress, irredeemably sexy with her aristocratic bones and tweed skirts, and Potter photographs her lovingly (she's never seen naked, or even close to it). But Allen also looks every minute of her age (which is 48), and in presenting her as a woman with a vibrant -- nay, voracious -- sexual appetite, Potter knows that she's violating one of the hoariest of film taboos. It's very hot.

For many audience members, that'll be more than enough. It's easy to deride Potter as a filmmaker for NPR listeners who don't go to the movies, but hey -- people who love Nina Totenberg have rights too. Personally, I'm disappointed that Potter settles for banal identity-politics whining and a phoned-in plot resolution after things get sticky between Allen and Akbarian. Then there's the final scene, which takes place on a beach in Cuba (so help me!). If the Nation carried cologne ads, this is what they'd look like. But I come to praise "Yes," not bury it. Sally Potter is brilliant and has balls -- what more do you want in a woman?

"Yes" opens June 24 in New York and Los Angeles, with other cities to follow.

Fast forward: Homage to Macedonia, and a crisp, terrifying "Elevator" ride
I caught up with Ivo Trajkov's "The Great Water" a bit late in the crush of recent foreign films, and it's an impressive entry in the eastern European memory-movie mode. A prominent politician in Macedonia (the former Yugoslav republic, not the Greek region) is rushed to the hospital after a crippling heart attack, and revisits brutal memories of his youth in a Stalinist reeducation camp for the children of "enemies of communism." Jug-headed little Saso Kekenovski plays the irrepressible hero, torn between a profoundly religious classmate who seems to possess mysterious powers and a fervent socialist vixen whose true passion is for Comrade Stalin.

Writer-director Trajkov was educated in Prague and now lives there, and "The Great Water" -- adapted from a famous Macedonian novel of the Tito period -- features many familiar Tarkovsky-lite cinematic gestures of eastern European magic realism. Few films from Macedonia have ever reached Western audiences (no others I can think of, in fact), so I was rooting for this one all the way. Despite his reliance on visual cliché, Trajkov mines a rich vein of morbid Slavic comedy, and his young characters have an appetite for adventure that's thoroughly unfake. (Now playing in New York, with more cities to follow.)

Perhaps more famous for the Miles Davis score that accompanies it than for the movie itself, Louis Malle's 1957 debut, "Elevator to the Gallows" (or, if you're British, "Lift to the Scaffold"), is back in a lustrous new 35 mm black-and-white print. I for one had never seen it before, and it turns out to be a lot more than a curiosity: It's a tightly structured thriller with a brilliantly moody performance by Jeanne Moreau, and depending on your point of view, it's either one of the few genuine French noir films or an early entry in the New Wave.

The plot is virtually archetypal: Moreau and her ex-paratrooper lover (Maurice Ronet) plot the murder of her husband, but one minor oversight launches a disastrous stream of consequences. We've got a murderer trapped in an elevator with the cops closing in, a beautiful woman wandering the Parisian streets alone and a couple of hotheaded kids in a stolen convertible with a loaded gun. The cinematography by Henri Decaë is amazing -- and yes, Davis' awesome cool-jazz score is even better with pictures attached. (Opens this week in New York and Boston, Aug. 19 in San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif., Sept. 9 in Washington, Sept. 16 in San Diego and Sept. 23 in Atlanta.)

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