Yes

Every now and then a movie escapes from one of those channels for chubby chicks munching on chocolates as tears run down their cheeks and finds itself in an actual theater, and that's what happened here.

Only thing is...it went a little insane on the way.

Insane in the sense it's got a video look rather than a film look that for no particular reason goes into choppy and slow-mo effects. Craziest than that, all of the dialog is written in rhyming iambic pentameter, like a Shakespearean play.

Granted, the characters (chief among them the protagonist, Joan Allen) deliver the lines in a way that somewhat obscures the rhythm and rhyme, but it leads to occasionally stilted dialog.

Aware, as I am, that poetry is as much music as literature, I found myself listening more to the music than the meaning much of the time, so I'm not sure that this experiment ended up mimicking Shakespeare so much as mocking him.

A much bigger, problem with the movie is the way it handles the East vs. West theme, for it's the chronicle of an affair between a Lebanese Muslim man, once a surgeon, but now working as a cook in and the character played by Joan Allen, the wife of a distant and wealthy man (Sam Neill).

They make love, but they live in two different worlds. She in the world of an Irish-American woman married to a rich British man, he in the world of a political refugee, scraping by in a country where he is an outsider.

There is a scene where he lays out the vast differences between them and their lives and she finally sees the chasm between them.

This East vs. West thing is punctuated by constant reminders of the classism that exists everywhere in the West, but is more pronounced in the UK. The "cleaner" (maid) in the house who delivers several soliloquies on what the lower-class person knows about the hoity-toities they serve. Now and then a servant or menial laborer will break character and look directly at the camera as if to remind us that there are people leading ordinary, dismal lives around the main characters.

The problem is that the movie betrays its intellectual self by giving us a romantic ending, as if to say that "What the Hell? Who cares about all this political shit? Let's just go out on a beach and roll around in the sand and then go back to our hotel room and fuck."

In the end, it's just an Oxygen Network romance done in an overly artsy-fartsy way.