A love triangle maybe? Or some sort of contest for affection? I'm not sure but sonnet 134 reads like it is not a lot of fun and indeed the writer is conceding that he has lost the competition if there was one – lost it but yet continues to suffer from experiencing it. Coming off the previous film on mortality, this was maybe a change in tone too much for me and I'll be honest and say I struggled through quite a few readings to try to make it flow in my head. Kudos to the film then, because I went in to find that while it gives it its own spin, it does so in a way that adds clarity of its own, and lets the viewer go back and consider other meanings, with that context helping provide a frame.
In the case here we have a young mother giving up her baby to a middle- class couple in an arrangement which is clearly not strictly legal, although clearly not sinister or harmful to the child either. This scenario adds a lot of weight to the text as it talks of paying, of debtor, of losing him (the baby) through abuse. It is a clever interpretation because it works within the film and helps make the sentences clearer in the context of the film and, as a result, makes them clearer when you read them in light of it. The performances are good even if I would have liked the girl in question to have been a bit more "worn" than she was – she contrasts with couple for sure, but it could have been more.
The voice-over of the sonnet is good, but I'm not sure how effective these films with the detached deliveries are – it works here but I prefer the words to be in play in the film, not floating above it like a separate but connected way. Despite some small misgivings, it does work well because it does something interesting with the sonnet but never loses it, actually making it more accessible and open to thought that it had been as just words on my screen.