Sonnet 116

More views of - or at - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 September

A rather faltering reading of Shakespeare in class (which did not, as I recall, include the closing couplet) starts Above us Only Sky (Über uns das All). The poem was still unmistakeable, and highly relevant: 'Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds'. We end with shots, the last with the credits rolling, of the place where Sandra Hüller, as Martha, had expected to be, but on a different basis.

In-between, she finds plenty of alteration, together with confusion, mistrust and loss, and a mystery for which she seems (doomed) to find no answer (and we no answer as to how it could financially have been maintained so that she did not know). Her courage in all this is immense, her denial is evidence of great hope, and she carries and conducts herself with a real knowledge of her worth, and of not wanting inconsequential formalities and pleasantries that do no more than irritate her by their emptiness.

Yet, as we would, we do doubt her mental state, whether, if not actually dissociating and trying to project one person's identity onto another, then perhaps seeking solace where time should heal (as the sonnet again says, 'Love alters not with [time's] brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom'): such concern is at its closest in one scene, where she barks out orders, and forces what she insists should be done in a humiliating and damaging way. But not a way that reckons with love, not a way that remembers being told that it is actually easier to make an apology weeks afterwards, although it seems awkward, because it has already been accepted in that time.

The warmth of the joking, the bantering, links this to the most positive parts in the short film Philipp that was shown before: there is a shared life that cuts through trite sentiments such as 'it feels as though we've always known each other', and appears, even with seeming 'impediments', to be 'the marriage of true minds'. (Lovely, also, to see all this against the background of Köln (Cologne), which has a special resonance for me since a long time ago.)


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