[FILM]
BENEDICTION
“Ready to bust out some old-school hip-hop moves, dearest?”
Alamy
★★★★
OUT 20 MAY CERT 12 / 137 MINS
DIRECTOR Terence Davies
CAST Jack Lowden, Peter Capaldi, Jeremy Irvine, Simon Russell Beale
PLOT Soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon (Lowden) returns from the war, decorated but disillusioned. His evocative writing on the horrors of the trenches makes him the toast of 1920s London, but a cloud of sorrow and survivor’s guilt follows him, casting a pall over his glamorous, bed-hopping life.
DROLL BANTER IS not a pleasure one might traditionally expect from the achingly sad films of Terence Davies. And yet Liverpool’s melancholy master of autobiography (The Long Day Closes) and adaptation (The Deep Blue Sea) has been in close touch lately with his inner Oscar Wilde, finding a fount of sparkling verbal wit in the life and work of iconic poets. First came A Quiet Passion, which depicted the quintessentially morbid Emily Dickinson as a silver-tongued conversationalist whose gift for the gab helped keep despair at bay. And now Davies has turned to a homegrown wordsmith of equally elegiac concerns, revelling in his cutting way with words while acknowledging the sorrow behind them.