Being honest, reading sonnet 38 for myself I felt like I was missing something and generally it was context. I guess this might be a downside of going through the sonnets in the order of the Sonnet Project films rather than numerical order, because they don't have the thematic flow that they may do otherwise. Anyway, it seemed to me that the sonnet was praising the writer's lover for inspiring such great work but, at the same time, almost making things difficult since they were too perfect to be written down in vulgar papers; I wasn't totally clear on the meaning and as such I was looking forward to the film to, if not explain it, then at least given me an interpretation of their own to help inspire me to review it in light of their take.
So what did we get? Well, we got the film set around the large cement version of Picasso's bust of Sylvette and with this it really does little else but walk around it. The actor delivers the sonnet in narration and on-camera he does little other than walk around the bust, running his hand over the cement while the camera either shoots it normally, captures the shadow of his hand or, for some reason, shoots it in a really over-exposed way so pretty much the whole screen is white. The choice of location is a good one since the sonnet is directed towards the writer's muse, and Sylvette was famously a great inspiration for Picasso, but this is something that is clear very on since the location is named, shown and the word "muse" is in the first line of the piece – so it is a shame that once that the original connection is made, all the film does is keep making it without adding much to the text itself.
Perhaps that is enough. After all, the sonnet is essentially praise and adoration for the writer's muse – so having the speaker interact with the sculpture with affection is pretty much in line with the words, it was just I was looking for it to work with the text, not just under it. Anyway, it is a film that I didn't care for as a result of this, that it just did this one thing and did so with oddly variable technical aspects (I assume the over-exposures etc must have been a deliberate creative choice). It does the job and works with the text's theme, but it didn't really engage or inspire me in what it does.
So what did we get? Well, we got the film set around the large cement version of Picasso's bust of Sylvette and with this it really does little else but walk around it. The actor delivers the sonnet in narration and on-camera he does little other than walk around the bust, running his hand over the cement while the camera either shoots it normally, captures the shadow of his hand or, for some reason, shoots it in a really over-exposed way so pretty much the whole screen is white. The choice of location is a good one since the sonnet is directed towards the writer's muse, and Sylvette was famously a great inspiration for Picasso, but this is something that is clear very on since the location is named, shown and the word "muse" is in the first line of the piece – so it is a shame that once that the original connection is made, all the film does is keep making it without adding much to the text itself.
Perhaps that is enough. After all, the sonnet is essentially praise and adoration for the writer's muse – so having the speaker interact with the sculpture with affection is pretty much in line with the words, it was just I was looking for it to work with the text, not just under it. Anyway, it is a film that I didn't care for as a result of this, that it just did this one thing and did so with oddly variable technical aspects (I assume the over-exposures etc must have been a deliberate creative choice). It does the job and works with the text's theme, but it didn't really engage or inspire me in what it does.