Sonnet #7: Film Noir
 

Film Noir

You know that, in the movies, they must meet—
those lovers whom the script has torn apart.
Though they loved with a passion bittersweet,
war or bad karma upped their applecart.
He perhaps deceived by some blond tart,
or she, to keep her brother out of jail,
with weeping eyes said yes to some old fart.
Fadeout with violins and nightingale.

Flash forward twenty years. A fairy tale.
They meet again—what luck!—both wiser, older.
And he is rich and strong; she fair and frail.
Oh, happy end. He reaches to enfold her.
That's when I blow my nose, cause in real life
I go to films and you go to your wife.

CATHY CHANDLER'S COMMENT: “Film Noir” is a finely crafted Spenserian sonnet, where the rhyme scheme weaves from quatrain to quatrain, ending in a couplet in IP. The shift comes at precisely the right moment it should in this rather difficult sonnet form. The poet has set the tone perfectly with the italicized word must in line 1 and the snide reversal of the phrase “passion bittersweet” in line 3. I’m not sure about “upped their applecart” as opposed to “upset” (a metrical fix would be needed), and the repetition of the word “some” in lines 5 and 7 may be construed either as an oversight or, again, irritable sarcasm. Though line 14 is good, I feel its tone is weaker than what we’ve seen in the previous lines.

Not too hard to guess whose this is. There are sotto voces, and then there are Voices. I like it very well.

COMMENT BY GAIL: The speaker who sounds like a cynic when dissecting the plots of old movies is revealed at the end as a sentimentalist who hides out in a three-hanky weeper while her married lover goes back to the home she can 't have. In that final couplet all intellectual pretense is gone. There's to be no fairy tale for this woman.
The sonnet has become a self-portrait.

This is neat, well-crafted and nicely turned - yet the volta seems a bit too whimsical for a potentially heart-rending reality. In other words, it is too like the superficiality of the movie plots which form the heart of the trope - all very aptly scaled, if one wants to be positive - yet diminishing of the real lives evoked at the conclusion of the final couplet. Craft greatly admired - but, for me, the content playing well below the needed emotional strength.

I think I'm saying again what I said on day 2: It's hard for a mostly tart-tongued, cynical sonnet based on stock content to compete with richer fare.

Yes, the stock content is being used to artful effect, and there's no reason not to enjoy the craft and the nicely snide tone. But there's much less here to dig into than in sonnet 6.

I liked this very much.

Upped their applecart is awkward and feels forced to fit the metre.

I think cause in the penultimate line should have an apostrophe. Or maybe change to "for".

Very heart-wrenching, self-aware and nicely done.

The volta comes too late--I've gotten what's up with the cliched movie lovers by the end of the octet, and want a better look at the narrator's real-life drama, so that there's more of a contrast between three-dimensional real people and one-dimensional movie people.

movie quotes
 

I wish the last line had cribbed from "When Harry Met Sally": "You're right. He's never gonna leave his wife."

The title would be more fitting if the narrator decided at the end to kill her lover's wife.

I find L3 awkwardly constructed. "Though they loved with a passion bittersweet" would work better as "Although their passion had been bittersweet." And in L4 "upped" should be "upset." I can't decide if "applecart" is really appropriate when it comes to "war" breaking lovers apart--consider Jennifer Jones's movies--or if it's a good reflection of a Myrna Loy cynicism.

I don't think you can use the groovy (and cliched) "bad karma" in the same poem as the pre-60s "applecart" and "tart" (and later "films") which themselves only work because the movie being watched must be an old one. Today's rom-coms wouldn't end with violins, but an upbeat pop number in order to help sell the soundtrack.

I think this ends very strongly. I like the "surprise" in the last line. But the octet strikes me as not spot-on enough in its knowing description of the typical film plot. I get the sense that it's meant to delight us with its insightful analysis of such plots, and we are supposed to be nodding our heads in recognition, but for me it comes off a bit flat and I don't actually think the octet provides a very interesting distillation of any particular movie genre (and certainly not film noir). I'd prefer the octet to skip the part about "movies" and "script" and simply describe a particular plot of a particular movie (which needn't, of course, be a real movie). There's too much throat-clearing in the opening, I think. And I'd get rid of the "perhaps" and just tell us what in fact happens in the film -- after all, the sestet doesn't say "perhaps" when we flash forward twenty years.

I just read Gail's comment and I must say that I hadn't understood that the "you" in L14 was her married lover. Gail is right, of course, but my take was that the speaker was a lonely man and "you" was not a particular person but a generalized luckier person who had managed to find himself a wife while our speaker never did. I do much prefer Gail's reading, so my suggestion would be to prepare the ground a bit more before the final couplet so that dense people like me can be better oriented.