Benediction (Terence Davies, 2022)
I actually didn't know Siegried Sassoon was homosexual, although I've read all of Sherston's Progress.
I thought there was a bit too much of Ivor Novello in this.
Peter Bradshaw:
Benediction proceeds in a series of movie tableaux with a stylised theatricality, a cinematic magic lantern show with conventionally acted scenes, archive first world war footage, grim clinical photographs, back-projections and superimpositions from which the figure of Siegfried Sassoon emerges: the hero who won the Military Cross for gallantry, but went on fiercely to oppose the war, wrote poetry about the hell of the trenches and befriended and inspired the young Wilfred Owen – yet after the war endured a long anticlimax of obscurity, disappointment and loneliness.
The film shows him agonised by unhappy gay relationships with men like Stephen Tennant and Ivor Novello, an acquaintance with brittle and conceited bright young things and excruciatingly minor artistic talents, then marooned in an unhappy marriage – which Davies portrays as more harshly unhappy than it may actually have been – and finally glumly set on converting to Catholicism, to the derision of his grownup son. Jack Lowden plays the young Sassoon and Peter Capaldi is the older version: there is an eerily disturbing CGI scene in which the young face morphs into the hawkish, fierce Sassoon in his older years. Guardian.
Mark Kermode:
There are moments of witheringly witty cattiness, too, as the postwar years find Sassoon in the brightly brittle company of Ivor Novello (a droll Jeremy Irvine) and preeningly snarky socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch, segueing into Anton Lesser), caustic friends and caddish lovers who merely amplify the emptiness that increasingly engulfs Sassoon. By contrast, Kate Phillips and Gemma Jones jointly offer sympathetic portraits of Hester Gatty, marriage to whom provides him with yet another futile search for redemption. In his later years, Sassoon is played by Peter Capaldi, whose face tellingly seems set in a mask of embittered despondency, bordering upon horror.
Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive. It’s a theme to which Davies has returned throughout his dazzling filmography, from his early shorts to this surprisingly accessible feature; a sense of unfulfilled longing that not even his many moments of cinematic transcendence can lay to rest. Guardian.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 19 December, 2022 | Now: 18 October, 2023