Five years after making a careful portrait of the famous American poet Emily Dickinson in ‘Story of a Passion’, Terence Davies returns to explore the storms of another poet. This time, the director delves into the life and work of the British poet Sigfried Sassoon in “Benediction”award for best screenplay at the 69th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival and which received two nominations at the BIFA Awards, for best screenplay and best costume, with Jack Lowden becoming the famous author.
In a way, ‘Benediction’, the second biopic of the English director’s filmography, maintains a pattern, as well as an atmosphere, very similar to ‘The Story of a Passion’, in which Davies faced Dickinson’s life by mixing scenes real with other dreamlike and elegant style but which conveys a certain feeling of bitter melancholy. That spirit is also permeated in the Sassoon movie, in which Davies does a careful portrait of the psychological consequences that have marked a man with a pacifist character whose pacifist attitude, which led him to face the same army for which he defended his country in the trenches of the First World Wardid not stop him from ending up possessed by the ghosts of his comrades who fell in battle, which led him to gradually enter a spiral of impossible romantic bonds, not to mention his obsession with transcending and overcoming death in some way.
Davies, who also wrote the script, takes Sassoon’s story into its own territory. A devout Catholic from early childhood, the director has spoken openly about how he fought against his own homosexuality and his feature films have had protagonists locked up in a mental, moral, sentimental or social prisona constant of his filmography which, in this proposal, seems to be the ideal cover to reflect on the torments of an artist consumed by his own demons, who chose a forward flight that condemned him to his own lonelinessas can be clearly seen from an outcome that provoked a series of sensations similar to that of Céline Sciamma’s ‘Portrait of a woman in flames’, in which she also told how social pressures condemned an impossible relationship between two women.
In this story of torment, Davies eschews conventional biographical formulas, combining narrative ellipses with sequences that pay homage to the author’s collection of poems, in which we see sequences of the First World War, in which the horror of war has shown the extent to which the human being is able to put aside his own humanity to show his wilder and more primitive side. In this sense, the director pays tribute to those who fell in battle, to those anonymous heroes who had to give their lives for a country and to some rulers who are the owners of the victories that have been obtained at the cost of the lives of millions of people. of people. “The soldiers are citizens of the gray land of death, preparing the dividend of tomorrow’s time”Sassoon wrote in his poem “Death”.
A new cinematic triumph for Davies
Mention, of course, for its protagonist. Jack Lowden is shown to have the essence of a tragic heartthrob. His interpretation of him is solid, it’s incredible how with his 32 years he manages to convey the weight of the years and like a mature Sassoon he succumbed to the conventions of a hypocritical society in frank decline. The Scottish actor consecrates himself with this film, showing an attention to detail and a pain for grief that show him how a worthy successor to Colin Firth’s acting style.
The anti-war spirit is reflected throughout the film, being one of the main torments of a man who decided to deny himself the right to happiness, as if to atone for the guilt of having survived both the First World War, in which he fought, and in the Second, that he was the one who unleashed his demons again. With an aesthetic that is ever closer to the David Lean, William Wyler or James Ivory style. Davies confirms himself as one of the last directors capable of bringing period cinema with delicate beauty which is becoming a kind of Gallic village in today’s industry.
‘Benediction’ knows how to pay homage to Sassoon, made with exquisite and graceful elegance, as if it were a waltz of the past, wrapped in a melancholy that is impossible not to get carried away. A new aesthetic and cinematic triumph for Davies, who is one of the few directors able to reflect the ambivalence of the beauty of pain.
Note: 8
The best: Jack Lowden’s interpretation, his careful scenography and that melancholy atmosphere that reigns in every scene.
Worse: Davies takes too many licenses when it comes to Sassoon’s old age, despite the fact that his divorce after the end of World War II was more than well known and that he lived in isolation in his own reveries, something that is hardly reflected in the film.
Source: E Cartelera
