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Then the aging Tennant (Anton Lesser) attempts to reconcile with the aging Sassoon (Peter Capaldi), who bitterly, brutally rebuffs him.
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One of the most astonishing flash forwards occurs when one of Sassoon’s lovers, Stephen Tennant (Calum Lynch), is looking in a mirror, ruing the inevitable ruin of his beautiful visage, only to have his face morph into that of the older man he will become decades later. In old age Sassoon is both stuck and untethered, just as he predicted himself to be, and these ironies ripple across the screen in medium shots that are charged by an exquisite paradox: these compositions are intimate from a distance. Turning to Catholicism late in life, as an act of desperation-Davies is also a lapsed Catholic-Sassoon becomes a bitter man trapped in a marriage of social necessity, lashing out at his (loving) wife and (resentful, yet stalwart) son alike. There are brief, startling leaps into the future, in which Sassoon’s agony is confirmed to be unrelieved. Sassoon is divorced from time by his participation in a war, which no one apart from another veteran can truly understand, and from his homosexuality, which social repression renders an open secret that engulfs him in the moneyed society of the London beau monde.
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There is a sense in each artist’s poetry of being able to see into the future and discern forthcoming disenchantment, which is an extension of the disenchantment that each already feels in the present day. Sassoon’s poetry is eaten up with ecstatic details that cumulatively convey rich inner and outer worlds, as is Davies’ own. “Benediction” is a haunted biography as autobiography. Davies is also gay, and his own poetry merges intuitively, rhapsodically, with Sassoon’s. Sassoon’s torment over survivor’s guilt and his perception of his political ineffectuality is buffeted by another misery: He is gay, and that lifestyle is illegal in Britain at the time. Ross’s acts of generosity are against Sassoon’s wishes, as he claims he was willing to face the firing squad to underscore the British aristocracy’s escalating colonialism. But luckily Sassoon was already an accomplished poet with friends in high places, such as Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), who is able to help get Sassoon classified as unstable and placed in a mental hospital. Protesting the war, especially as a deserter, was punishable by death. He spent nearly three years in the trenches before becoming a conscientious objector. Sassoon served in the First World War and it would haunt him throughout his life. One can easily imagine how an ordinary director would set all of this up with a few characters sitting in a drawing room, talking of the war over puffs of pipe smoke and sips of brandy. All accomplished via daringly merged audio and images that feel free-associational as well as fiercely concentrated. In one scene, Davies merges with a master’s ease a vision of the past with future retrospection as well as the brutal realities of war with the privileges of the elite, which all merge to establish how multiple experiences coalesce and linger to form a state of mind and an artistic sensibility. It’s London of 1914, and Sassoon (played as a young man by Jack Lowden) is at a theater seeing the Diaghilev ballet set to Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” As voiceover, we hear Sassoon reading the poem that this night would inspire, “Concert-Interpretation,” and the theater curtains draw to reveal not a show but stock footage of the First World War. The opening scene of “Benediction” establishes its formal audacity. Next to “A Quiet Passion,” his 2017 film about the American poet Emily Dickinson, and “Benediction,” his new film about the British war poet Siegfried Sassoon, most biopics resemble weak tea. In his cinema, all of time exists simultaneously as an unmooring slipstream. Davies’ blend of fiction and documentary forms serves as a truly modern refute of the static three-act structure that drives most movies.ĭavies doesn’t do “and then this happened,” piling scenes atop one another in chronological and psychologically pat order until a hero reaches a preordained catharsis. Beginning in 1988 with “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” British filmmaker Terence Davies has fashioned a remarkable body of work that suggests a reckoning with the legacy of his country and his place within it.