Nobody in this poem is certain of anything, least of all the speaker. Three times the same lines come round, "Was it so / An old movie / I don't know", like someone prodding at a memory and getting the same shrug back each time. The thing being remembered is never named. Instead the poem borrows the vocabulary of film: a hero, a heroine, cuts, takes, a field of sunflowers. Judging by those words, the speaker is looking back at something romantic, or something that felt romantic, and can no longer tell whether it happened or was only watched.
That is the central idea: memory and fiction blur until the speaker can't separate them. The title matters here. "Old" suggests a film that has been replayed so often it has gone scratchy and lost its details. The metaphor cuts two ways. If the past was "an old movie", it may have been beautiful and almost scripted, or it may never have been quite real. The poem refuses to choose.
The construction is simple, and the simplicity does the work. The refrain appears three times, and between each appearance come two questions, so the poem moves in a steady pattern of ask, shrug, ask again. It is nearly all free verse in short, plain lines, with one exception: "so" and "know" rhyme. That rhyme is the poem's only music, and it is neatly ironic. The question ends on "so", the answer on "know", and the chime ties asking and not knowing together. Nothing is punctuated either, not even the questions. They never rise at the end the way a question normally does, so the voice sounds flat and murmuring, a mind half-talking to itself.
Tense is worth noticing. Almost every line begins with "Was", the past tense, but the one flat statement the speaker can make is in the present: "I don't know." The past is a blur and the present is ignorance. When the poem finally ventures a guess, "May be it was", it drops straight back into "was". The split "May be" slows the line into two beats, as if the speaker is reluctant to commit.
The paired questions make a small progression. The first pair, "Was he the Hero / Was I the heroine", asks about roles. The speaker doubts whether the two of them were really lovers or only cast as lovers, and talks about herself as a character rather than a participant. The capital on "Hero" against the lowercase "heroine" may be accidental, but it makes him loom slightly larger. The second pair moves from the story to the machinery behind it: "Was there any cuts any takes". Real life has no retakes, and film has little else. The question might mean that memory edits itself, trimming the awkward scenes, or that the relationship felt rehearsed. The grammar is casual and a little off, which keeps the voice conversational rather than polished.
Then comes the poem's only concrete image: "Was there any flied of sunflowers". "Flied" is presumably "field", and the slip, accidental or not, adds to the unsteady feel. After so many abstract questions, the sunflowers arrive like a flash of colour. Sunflowers turn toward the light, and a whole field of them is a postcard-perfect setting. That is the catch. The most vivid detail is also the one that sounds most like a film set, so the speaker questions the very image that seems most real.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves open. Because the event is never named, readers can fill the gap with their own half-remembered summers, friendships or crushes. Most people know the odd feeling of recalling something so clearly that it seems staged, or so faintly that it might have been borrowed from somewhere else. The poem catches that feeling without explaining it. The ending also stays honest: "May be it was" is not a revelation, just a small lean toward yes. Try reading it aloud and you will hear how the repetition makes you circle the memory along with the speaker, never quite landing.