The British Terence Davis will go down in history as an exquisite director, direct heir to the tradition of the Austrian Josef von Sternberg and the German Max Ophülswith whom he shares his penchant for more or less disheveled melodrama, with an aesthetic refinement that is as thorough as it is obsessive, and care for the unusual and demanding image, signs of a recognizable style chiseled over the years but already present since his first short films in the mid-seventies.
This does not mean that recurring themes are not appreciated in his filmography: thus, from the autobiographical features of ´Distant Voices´ (1988) and ´The Long Day Ends` (1992), we move on to the challenge of adapting related literary works, as in ´The Neon Bible´ (1995), based on the John Kennedy Toole classic. From then on, the autobiographical aspect of Davies’s work fades, without ceasing to be present, to be recognized in literary characters and, later, in the lives of artists, in a very peculiar and personal declension of the archetypal biopic, on the opposite shore to the grandiloquence and reductionism of North American cinema.
In 1994 he was inspired by the novel by Edith Warthon, author of ´The Age of Innocence´ to make the first important approach to a female character of substance, the one played by Gillian Anderson in ´The House of Joy´ (2000). Eight years separate this and her next film, the documentary, ´Of time and the city´ (2008) focused on her Liverpool native, who had already been silent but omnipresent protagonist of his first two feature films.
In 2011 he made one of his most important and acclaimed works, ´The Deep Blue Sea´, based on the novel by Terence Rattigan, where a review of the myths and tropes of classic cinema very similar to that of director Todd Haynes. The first years of the Great War will be the starting point for his next film, ´Sunset Song´ (2018), this time based on the novel by the Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon and again with a female character in the lead. A feature that will be repeated in his first biopic and, by the way, one of his best films: ´History of a passion´ (‘A Quiet Passion’, 2016), an intense and devastating approach to the life of the poet Emily Dickinson masterfully performed by Cynthia Nixon.
twice me
With everything written above, it is not surprising that Davies was interested in adapting the life of the poet to the big screen. Siegfried Sasson, from a script, as usual, signed by himself. First, because the limited success of the artist’s work allowed him to develop his idea of “antibiopic” British, focused on both artistic and existential failure, and the heartbreak and melancholy that comes with it.
Secondly, because Sasson’s unique career allowed him to speak openly about some of the obsessions that had punctuated his work up to now: the homosexuality (Davies is gay, as was Sasson), the pacifism (in an approach to a historical period that had already been addressed in ´Sunset song´), the idea of art and religion.
Sasson, however, was by no means a failure, no matter how much his name has faded in the course of history: his anti-war poems became very famous at the time, after serving in the British Army in World War I. , but his greatest recognition would be obtained with his autobiographical work Sherston’s trilogy. For his military merits he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and received the Military Cross. Raised in Judaism, he was disinherited by marrying a Catholic woman and embracing his religion.
Davies, meanwhile, was raised Catholic by a deeply religious mother, but later rejected religion, converting to atheism. We do not know to what extent this decision was related to his acknowledged homosexuality. Despite being the father of three children, Sasson began to live his sexual condition more openly in the post-war period, starting a love relationship with the artist. Gabriel Atkins.
In short, Sasson is a character tormented by numerous flanks and approaching ´blessing´ It is difficult to differentiate when Davies is talking about himself and when he is devoting himself to illustrating the doubts, misunderstandings, obsessions and conflicts of Sasson himself. It doesn’t matter, because everything is part of the very personal vision that the author has of the biopic and his particular and emotional relationship with the protagonist, and this is what makes the result a closest, passionate, epidermal and fascinating exercise.
The film spends considerable time developing the narrator and poet’s ideas of pacifism, which in the story carry even more weight than his homosexuality, his socialist sympathies or religion, although all these factors are part of the protagonist’s internal contradictions and doubts. . At a time when the war dragged on too long, Sasson refused to return to service despite the decorations he received. Here they have special weight pacifist ideas of Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morellto which Davies constantly resorts.
Sasson’s words illustrating this period of confrontation were famous: “I believe that the war that I once entered as a war of defense and liberation has become a war of aggression and conquest.” All this has in the film a faithful reflection, loaded with the right emotion.
‘Benediction’: love and poetry in times of war
But ´Benediction´ not only talks about pacifism, sexuality and religion. Sasson’s conception of art and poetry, highly influenced by the poet’s thought, is also important. Wilfred Owen, who was his comrade in war. After the war, Sasson would go to great lengths to make his friend’s work widely known to a wider public, mentoring him in producing poetry that was initially heavily indebted to Keats or Shelly.
Today, while Sasson is practically forgotten, Owen is considered the most important poet of World War I and this paradox is also one of the central engines of the film, which intensifies its bitter aftertaste and its character of antithesis to the usual triumphalist biography.
With these complex and varied wickerwork, Davies reconstructs the life of the writer in a dense and complex filmpregnant with uneasiness and bitterness, formally somewhat overwhelming in its pictorial composition of each sequence, and as bewitching at times as it is finally motley and, what is worse, even cold. It is paradoxical, and largely frustrating, that a work in which its author has put so much of himself, in the end, turns out to be so excessively calculated and only gets carried away by emotion on specific occasions.
Perhaps the excessive respect for what is narrated, as well as the evident closeness of the author to the character portrayed, has been what has diminished the final strength of the result. The work of all the interpreters flies highespecially the protagonist Jack Lowden. As highlighted by that moving, brutal closing shot that would have been the perfect finishing touch for the masterpiece that ‘Benediction’, for various reasons, fails to become.
Note: ‘Benediction’ premiered in theaters in Spain on July 8, almost a year after its premiere at the San Sebastian Festival.