Benediction * * *

I really can't see the point in this film. Then again I couldn't see the point in the last Terence Davies film I saw either (Sunset Song).  Given how morose his films are I'm amazed he can get financial backing, but he does, and I'm a great believer in diversity so good for him.

Just act normal

In Benediction he has chosen to tell the story of poet Siegfried Sassoon, who is mostly known for his poems regarding the First World War, in which he served - and later became a fierce critic of its continuance.

Given their subject matter - an event over a hundred years ago - the poems seem quite irrelevant today.  They are very good poems apparently, but like most people today, I wouldn't know. The occasional narration just goes in one ear and out the other "Huh? What'd he say?"  To really appreciate them I think you'd have sit quietly and read each one a few times (but isn't that true of most poems?)

Other than learning of his bravery, contrasting with his insubordination, I didn't find it a particularly interesting biography.  It seemed to have an awful lot of self-conscious scenes and stiff acting, but maybe that's just the script showing us the stereotypical English officer.

In contrast, there was all this cattiness and bitchiness as we get to know his post-war boyfriends.  I mean, some scenes were just people saying clever but horribly unkind things to each other. Put downs and sniping and giggling about promiscuity.  A lot of the conversations are just "claws out", smarty pant one-liners, which is fine in a dramatic story or a comedy but it sounded contrived and inappropriate in a biography.  One would expect a biography to fairly reflect the way people talk in real life - unless they all lived like Liberace.  

We get to meet his acquaintances from "The Bright Young People", as they were referred to in the popular press. You'd have to be more interested than me in this archaic group to know if the portrayal of them is correct. I hadn't even heard of half of them before (it was interesting to look them up afterwards though, and learn that they did burn bright for a short while).  Indeed, fame is fleeting.

The gay men are obviously gay even as they talk about the need to be discreet. I don't know, but somehow I doubt such open flamboyance was on display a hundred years ago. 

Sassoon himself has a string of unhappy gay relationships followed by marriage to woman, which is also portrayed as unhappy, as his relationship with his son.

For me, Benediction was a well crafted boring film. I doubt that Sassoon's colourful friends would have hung around the full two and half hours to the end.  I did, watching it conclude on a painfully melancholic scene. You could see that coming!