Just now came across your article. Nice to see someone comment on the film’s Shakespeare after all the discussion about is it a road movie, is it about Amazon, blah, blah, blah.
I was a little puzzled by Fran’s recitation of Sonnet 18. I figured it had some connection to the earlier Shakespeare quotation in the grocery store, but also thought maybe Zhao just included it because she thought it would be lovely (as good a reason as any). Then it occurred to me one day that the final couplet had been neatly summarized earlier in the film’s dialogue: “What’s remembered lives.” So: this is a movie about memory and its connection to loss, grief, mortality.
I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic sonnets since they seem so tied to the conventions of his time and can feel like the same thing written over and over, but this was a brilliant use of one.
Incidentally, A.Z. Foreman’s blog includes a recording of what Sonnet 18 might have sounded like 400 years ago (when temperate and date still rhymed):
Thank you for your analysis. I watched the movie in English, but as a non native English speaker, I didn't really understood the poems. I searched for them and I found your page for a great explanation.
I'd like to add that the first poem in the movie, the one that the girl pupil recites in the supermarket at the beginning of the movie is also Shakespeare, from Machbeth, and it's meaning is the opposite as Sonnet 18. Greetings from Hungary
Just now came across your article. Nice to see someone comment on the film’s Shakespeare after all the discussion about is it a road movie, is it about Amazon, blah, blah, blah.
I was a little puzzled by Fran’s recitation of Sonnet 18. I figured it had some connection to the earlier Shakespeare quotation in the grocery store, but also thought maybe Zhao just included it because she thought it would be lovely (as good a reason as any). Then it occurred to me one day that the final couplet had been neatly summarized earlier in the film’s dialogue: “What’s remembered lives.” So: this is a movie about memory and its connection to loss, grief, mortality.
I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic sonnets since they seem so tied to the conventions of his time and can feel like the same thing written over and over, but this was a brilliant use of one.
Incidentally, A.Z. Foreman’s blog includes a recording of what Sonnet 18 might have sounded like 400 years ago (when temperate and date still rhymed):
https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2020/07/voices-of-earlier-english-robert.html
Thank you for your analysis. I watched the movie in English, but as a non native English speaker, I didn't really understood the poems. I searched for them and I found your page for a great explanation.
I'd like to add that the first poem in the movie, the one that the girl pupil recites in the supermarket at the beginning of the movie is also Shakespeare, from Machbeth, and it's meaning is the opposite as Sonnet 18. Greetings from Hungary