Benediction
Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. Again and again,
and again and again, and again and again...
dir: Terence Davies
2022
It seems almost redundant saying that a film made by Terence Davies is a sad one, because…If you’ve seen any of his films, especially his more auto-biographical ones, you know. This one, however, is a biopic, of the life of the poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, as the younger version) who fought in and then rejected the underlying premises of the so-called Great War, before he was institutionalised for his disobedience.
He writes to his superiors with exasperated disgust that his betters have been lying to the poor soldiers going off to die, and so they fight under false pretences. As such he rejects their authority in sending him off again, and objects, conscientiously or otherwise, to the war itself.
If he were a poorer man, they might have fucked him up royally for defying the right of Empire to do as it will. But as he is from a wealthy family, well…
Unlike the way those kinds of stories usually go, he was neither mistreated, lobotomised nor electro-shocked half to death. He merely had some chats with a sympathetic doctor (a very gentle and charming Ben Daniels, in a film filled with charming but not gentle people), and meets one of (I think) the loves of his life, being Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson).
The slight, pale Owen, who stutters and seems quite fearful, if we, the audience, know of him, it’s in the context of his famous poetry about just how horrible being in the trenches was. His poem Dulce et Decorum est must have been taught to every school kid throughout the Commonwealth, or at least the schoolboys, back in the 1980s. Or maybe I should narrow it down further to those of us who were taught out of Seven Centuries of Poetry in English…
After they spend a brief enough time together, Owen is deemed to be fit for service again, and is sent off for the purposes of irony to be killed a week before the end of the war.
Oh cruellest fate. If Sassoon didn’t have enough disgust for the war and the Empire beforehand, he has even more cause now.
His chats with the good doctor allow him, in that safe space, to confess to often experiencing the love for his fellow man that dare not speaketh its name, which the doctor himself mentions he has experienced himself. The question is made of how one is meant to live this life in an era where people without enough connections can still be destroyed for it.
Discretion seems to be the key. Also, being rich seems to help.
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