The war poet’s life provides rich material for director Terence Davies to explore his preoccupations with sexuality, religion and the search for redemptionTerence Davies, the writer-director behind such modern classics as Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes and more recently Sunset Song, has long been one of the great poets of British cinema.
It’s perhaps unsurprising therefore that his films have occasionally focused on the lives of poets: Emily Dickinson in 2016’s A Quiet Passion, and now Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction.
Davies’s portrait of Dickinson was a heartfelt paean to a creative talent who went largely unrecognised in her own lifetime.
His account of Sassoon’s tribulations is more unforgiving, confronting us with a contradictory character locked in his own private hell – keenly attuned to the horrors of war, yet seemingly unable to change either himself or the world around him, whether through art or action.
Read full article