Benediction (2021) was British director Terence Davies’ final film before he died in 2023. Experiencing it after recently seeing his first film, Distant Voices, Still Lives, was very interesting with their intersections. Distant Voices, Still Lives is an autobiography by Davies of his family growing up in working class Liverpool. In contrast, Benediction is a biopic of poet and decorated WW1 veteran Siegfried Sassoon. We mainly follow Sassoon as a young man played by Jack Lowden. Yet we also see him as an older man played by Peter Capaldi. There is some similarity in the father figure from Distant Voices that was memorably portrayed by Pete Postlewaite. While Sassoon is not at all violent or abusive, and maybe Davies would balk at the comparison, there is a glowering rigidity. Of being older, silent and unyielding. With Benediction, it looks at many things to do with Sassoon’s life, but there is that sense of time and memory, of looking at one’s self in the mirror, seeing all the lovers you danced with, and your current wife, and then yourself now and not recognising who that is.
I had no frame of reference for Sassoon or his poetry, though I recognised the names of his paramours including fellow poet Wilfred Owen and actor Ivor Novello. Lowden is excellent at conveying the different stages in Sassoon’s youth, from haunted war veteran committed to an institute for his disobedience and pacifist political stance, to his movement through upper crust society and his affairs with men even within a society where homosexuality is still outlawed, and his eventual desperation to be “redeemed” by marrying Hester (Kate Phillips) and having a child.
Davies surprises with his artistry even within digital filmmaking, incorporating footage and photographs from WW1, and offering strange dissolves and sequences, like the intercutting of cattle footage with trench warfare scored to ‘Ghost Riders In The Sky.’ The use of poetry in voice-over, and touches of avant garde that peek through in a film about the young men sacrificed in war and the “shadow life” of gay men during this time. There’s comedy in the catty bon mots and insults that the men in high society throw at each other, and ultimately a thematic significance to Davies in the impossibility of feeling resolved or freed, the pain of aging. I was very struck by Benediction, particularly the heartbreaking final shot. Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.
VHS Tracking 