Since his first feature “Distant voice, live quietly” In 1988, British writer and director Terence Davies produced a handful of films that could be described as poetic because of their emotional delicacy and formal accuracy. Recently he has made a movie about a poet, but it’s not exactly the same.
“Biopic” is a clumsy word in the prosac genre, and the writer’s screen biography tends to be more literal than lyrical. With the exception of Davis’s “Quiet Passion”, which portrayed Emily Dickinson’s life in 2017, I thought she was paying attention to the subject’s inner weather for details of her time and place. Some of Dickinson’s fans felt that wasn’t the case, but I still claim that the film and Cynthia Nixon’s core performances brought back the poet’s unique and indelible genius.
The “benediction” about the English poet Siegfried Sassoon is, in a sense, a more customary matter. Sasun, who lived from the late Victorian era to the 1960s, is mainly remembered as one of the war poets. Their experience in World War I trenches influenced the wording and direction-changing poetry of English literature. Davis begins the film powerfully with poetry, prose memoirs, and archived images of the slaughter with the generous words of Sasun drawn from letters.
Similar words and images are occasionally repeated at various points in the story that jump forward in time, but it mainly tells the chronology of Sasun’s postwar life. He is played by Jack Lowden in his thirties and forties, and by Peter Capaldi as an older unhappy man. Peter Capaldi resembles a photo of Sasun’s later years.
Sasun, who has already gained fame as a writer during the war, refuses further service because “the war is deliberately extended by those who have the power to end the war.” It circulates a bitter anti-war statement to do. Expecting a court martial and at least preparing to confront the firing squad, he instead, thanks to the intervention of a well-placed older friend named Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beer). Called before the medical committee. His pacifism was classified as a psychological disorder, where he was sent to the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where he disclosed homosexuality to a homosexual doctor (Bendaniels) and made friends with Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tenison). Will be. He acts shortly before Armistice.
Subsequent social and romantic activities of Sasun occupy most of the second half of the “benediction”. In other words, his writing disappears in the background. The portrait of the suffering artist becomes a somewhat familiar tableau in Britain between wars, with Bright Young Things coming and going, speaking in beautifully bent, terribly cruel phrases. (“It was probably a little too disgusting,” Sasun was told by one victim of his thorns.mordant It will be a more accurate word, “Sasun replies. ) Winston Churchill is mentioned as someone who knows. Edith Sitwell, Lady Ottoline Morrell and TE Lawrence are all easy to come by.
Davis offers a leisurely tour of the privileged and educated gay circles that helped keep time in order. I think “gay” is a bit outdated here, but many of Sasun’s friends and lovers, such as composer and second actor Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and legendary diletant Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch). I am conscious. It belongs to a tradition that connects sexuality with cultural attitudes and artistic pursuits. Oscar Wilde was called as a vigilant person because he was charged as an idol and in the 1890s.
Sasun and his cohort work on occasional strategic compromises with discretion, irony, and heterosexuality. The marriage of Sasun and Hester Gati (Kate Phillips, and Gemma Jones) gave birth to a boy named George (Richard Goulding), who was affectionate, unfantasy, and endured the grumpy conservatism of his father’s old age. ..
Sasun’s dissatisfaction with rock and roll and his conversion to Roman Catholicism feels more like a formal biographical fact than an expression of personality. The more intimate passage of “Benediction”, the relationship between Novello and the tenants, and the heartache that follows each end, is suppressed rather than passionate. In part, this reflects Sasun’s own temperament, and Craiglockhart’s doctors say it is characterized by prudence and separation. But this movie never reminds me of the connection between life and work.
Except for a pair of extraordinary scenes, including Wilfred Owen’s work, not Sasun’s work. Sasun confesses that he is looking down on Owen when he first meets, not only because of his age but also because of his class, but he comes to consider him a “greater poet.” History has largely supported this decision, and Davis takes it home with amazing power.
At the hospital, Owen asks for his opinion on a poem called Sasun. “invalid,” Sasun reads it silently and then pronounces it wonderful. The audience will not hear Owen’s words until the final scene of the movie. In this scene, the tragic story of a young man’s poem that was hurt in the battle is impressively drawn on the screen. Until that moment, we thought about war, heard it in poetry, and got a glimpse of its brutality. And we feel it through the filter of Susoon’s distressed memory.
benediction
It is rated as PG-13. Sex and war are treated with caution. Execution time: 2 hours 17 minutes. At the theater.
