The Sonnet Project Sonnet #52 (2013– ) watch online HD

There are many reasons why Shakespeare persists to this day and one such reason is that while most of us would just trot out "absence makes the heart grow fonder", Shakespeare essentially says the same but does so in this beautiful sonnet – or at least that is what I get when I read it, since the treasure is locked away and, like feasts, contact is rare. I say this is what I get out of it because although it seemed reasonably clear to me, the film seems to have a different view and it is one I didn't completely understand.

In the film we get a young man who is waiting around, looking at his watch; all is black & white but, in a nice device, becomes color as a young woman emerges with a map. He walks towards her, she notices him and smiles but, as he approaches, another man comes along, points out where she needs to go, and she's off as we fade to monochrome again, leaving the young man anguished. I guess I misunderstand the sonnet because nothing in the film really fitted with my understanding of it, but at the same time nothing in it actually helped me see what the makers had interpreted either. I guess the last line has it all in the word 'hope' and thus everything beforehand had been longing from a distance. If this is the case then the sonnet and the film feels overdone – so much anguish, so much longing over a pretty face and a long pair of legs (meaning no offence to Martin).

In this physical performance and his vocal one, there was too much of this from Vasquez; I guess he was directed this way but it felt overwrought and hammy as he grasped at walls and swung away in pain at the idea that he never got to talk to the pretty girl that smiled at him across the plaza. I guess the film had a good stab at connecting to modern life, but it didn't work and I didn't think the film made the right connections – or that it managed to sell the context in which it tried to deliver the text.