Benediction
Rating: *** ½
There are two ways one can manoeuvre one’s way through the labyrinth of life. You can either go unthinkingly with the flow without questioning why you are made to do what you are doing. Or you can spend your entire life challenging the status quo and protesting against the sacred cows.
The latter option is not easy to go with.Siegfried Sassoon, played with an engaging equipoise by Jack Lowden, did. He was an anti-war poet and a soldier during World War 1, and when he questioned what he called the butchery of war he was sent by a war trial, to an asylum where he was treated for mental stress.
Happily, it was not one of those electric-shock horror hospitals, but a place of actual healing.I wonder what the outcome of the war trial would have been if the jury members knew that Sassoon was, ahem, gay.
In a delightful conversation with his therapist(Ben Daniels) Sassoon cautiously suggests his sexual leanings and the doctor reciprocates by suggestive the same for himself. It is a delightfully constructed conversation,neither judgmental nor sassy, and one that shows director Terence Davies’ mastery over the map of the mind and the heart.
Benediction takes us through what one may for the want of a better term describe as a rollercoaster ride through Sassoon’s love life. His various male lovers are brash, beguiling brutal and …well, hardly fulfilling.
Contrary to the fearless tone of his anti-war poetry , Sassoon seems to enjoy being in degrading relations with selfish vain lovers, well played, I might add, by actors who know how to play selfish and vain. The most damaging relationship is with Ivor Novello(Jeremy Irvine) about whom Sassoon’s mother warns him.
But is he listening? The saga of a rebel without a cross, gets sadder as Sassoon gets older.There is a calming rhythm to Sassoon’s relationship with fellow-poet Wilfred Owen(played by Matthew Tennyson).
Sassoon’s marriage to the gentle pliable Hester, a woman who accepts his sexuality and doesn’t pester , is the final buckling down of the rebel. The closing interlude between the aging Sassoon(played by another actor, Peter Capaldi) and his exasperated son who cannot seem to follow his father’s sudden shifts of priority and faith, made me think of how lucky Sassoon was to have averted permanent damage for being a war deserter and a homosexual at time when both were serious crimes.
And how fortunate Siegfried Sassoon is to have someone as sensitive as brave as Terence Davies make a film on his life.Beautifully framed in the colours of the dying sun, Benediction is that rare film which crosses the thin line between real life and its cinematic rendition,with seamless fluency.
