Sonnet #20

Reading sonnet 20 a few times I realized that the many references to both men and women in there were not to separate them but actually seemed to be more focused on a man but making references to him as having a painted face like a woman, or being intended for women but attractive also to men. It is an odd thing to read from so long ago and although it remains poetic in its nature and never gets down to anything more serious, it is pretty clear that the writer is admiring a man for his physical nature.

I expecting the modern film version made in this project to play this attraction to a man a certain way and it does indeed do so. We join two men sitting on benches on either side of the small Christopher Park in Manhattan; one sits nervously waiting for someone or thinking about someone while turning a matchbook containing the name Chris, over and over in his hands, while the other man delivers the sonnet. This felt odd to me because, no offence, the silent man was not the thing of beauty that was being described. However the speaker did pretty well to deliver the feeling that he did consider this man beautiful – which is more important than me feeling it. This actor is prone to the Shakespearean style of delivery and does stride across the park with a slight stoop forward, which feels like the material forced him to do it since it is the done thing. His delivery was good though and I particularly appreciated that his pauses and emphasizing of the word 'pricked' in the final sentences helped me get the meaning I had missed on the written word. However the film is more than just him, and in this aspect I had problems.

The concept of the film appears to be that the speaker is the inner monologue of the silent man; and his thoughts of this other man are for the unseen Chris. At the end he concludes that he can have a relationship with Chris (even if physically Chris is made by nature for women's pleasure, it doesn't mean that they cannot share something else). This decision is demonstrated by the silent man heading into Stonewall, a gay bar. I sort of felt that was too obvious a thing to do and it clashed with the statements in the sonnet that seemed to say that such things were unnatural physically and that the addition of a penis added nothing of use to the other man's purpose – not particularly a pro-gay message even if emotionally it is along these lines. As a result I felt the very simple scene of a man thinking of hooking up with another man then going for it was really a bit obvious and flat compared to the longing and reasoning which appeared to be going on in the words. The speaker makes the most of these in his delivery but the silent man and his story just didn't fit with it.

Unlike the majority of the other sonnets films though, this one does at least take a few seconds at the end so the viewer can digest rather than feeling rushed into the credits. The sonnet itself is interesting in its sexuality, and for a while I felt that the film was playing with that but for my money the "heading into a gay bar" ending to the film's narrative clashed somewhat with the words and tone of the delivery. I liked that it tried to tell a story around and under the sonnet (while others thus far have tended to just deliver it and not add too much with their film) but the conclusion didn't fit as well as I would have liked, in my opinion.