Battle for his soul
Terence Davies would appear to be spending this part of his career pondering the lives of the poets. In his previous film, A Quiet Passion, the elder statesman of British art cinema delicately dramatised the cloistered existence of Emily Dickinson. In his latest, his focus turns to Siegfried Sassoon. Benediction isn’t just about Sassoon becoming a poet and a decorated hero of – as well as an eventual objector to – World War I. It also swings from his gay love life among the bohemian Bright Young Things of the 1920s and 30s before marrying in 1933 and becoming a father, to his late-life conversion to Catholicism before his death in 1967.
