Pushing limits? Yes

Sally POTTER is a filmmaker with legs, great ones actually, literally and metaphorically. Seen slinking on screen with Argentine heartthrob and tango sensation Pablo Veron in “The Tango Lesson,” Potter boldly cast herself in the 1997 film, which she wrote and directed and for which she co-composed much of the steamy music.

Smashing boundaries is nothing new for the British auteur, who made her name in 1992 with the Oscar-nominated “Orlando.” Casting Tilda Swinton as a man in the screenplay she adapted from the Virginia Woolf classic, Potter upended notions of gender and identity.

She briefly rose to Hollywood heights in 2000 with the $20-million “The Man Who Cried,” set in the rarefied world of opera, with Johnny Depp as its star and Paris as the backdrop to encroaching Nazism.

Now, with a budget hovering around $3 million, Potter pushes the medium again with “Yes.” The story of a fervent love affair between an American scientist (Joan Allen) and a Lebanese surgeon-cum-sous-chef (Simon Abkarian), the film is a 100-minute love poem, the dialogue iambic pentameter.

You wrote this as a response to the attacks of Sept. 11, weaving a tale that tests contemporary political, erotic, moral and religious limits in a kind of cinematic libretto. Why verse?

I started not thinking of it as a feature but as a short film and very quickly realized this was something I could develop. This was not rational choice but an intuitive leap into the unknown, though it felt absolutely normal, and the language just came out that way. The form probably also came out of my long-term interests in the song form, the lyric form. Poetry and verse are somehow closer to the secret machinery of the mind than prose.

So the writing flowed easily?

I was dreaming in verse at night. I became completely obsessive -- some little switch kept coming on. That’s one of the miracles of language and rhymes. It brings out a primal relationship with speech. I haven’t entirely stopped -- I just wrote a poem yesterday to send to poetry slammers in San Francisco.

‘Yes’ is the last word of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” What’s the Joycean factor for you?

Molly Bloom’s ecstatic monologue at the end of “Ulysses” is a great affirmation of love, the rhythm of love. The desire to try and find a cinematic equivalent of the stream of consciousness, and to do it with as much courage as Joyce had when he took the leap to write “Ulysses,” has been a long-term ambition of mine. But it’s only a film. It’s not going to change the course of events, though it can work on the subtle body, the body of emotion, and give people a space in which to contemplate things.

Love story, then, or fairy tale, with the adulterous wife ending up with her outcast lover on a tropical island?

It is a fairy tale, but it’s also the ultimate realism. The most real, the most profound experiences we have tend to be around love. Hate is a very strong emotion too, but it’s not what creates life.

You make use of a gamine-like cleaning woman as one-person Greek chorus, speaking directly to the camera, ruminating on germs, heartbreak and things existential. What’s that about?

Cleaners are the unsung

heroines of our existence, the invisible ones, the lowest caste in every society, but their very invisibility gives them the privileges

of witnessing. I began to think of them as secret philosophers, the scientists of dust and dirt. Because of the potential heaviness of the subject matter, we needed moments of relief and humor.

I also remembered that that

was my first job when I was 16,

so I know the music of their speech, and that’s how I took my revenge.

Had you been to Cuba before, or did you write that into the script because you longed to travel there?

[She roars.] Is it that obvious? I hadn’t been to Cuba, but the auntie [character] said, ‘You must go,’ so who am I to disobey?

-- Victoria Looseleaf