![]() ![]() The potential devastation of these threats is suggested by the very presence of Sassoon’s close friend Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), who, as Sassoon reminds a mutual acquaintance, took great risks to defend Oscar Wilde (who was imprisoned for his sexuality) and to preserve his literary legacy. A gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, Sassoon (played, as a young man, by Jack Lowden) was a part of what one lover calls “the shadow life,” a glittering underground of sophisticates and socialites whose eminence and glamour are menaced by the persecutions of power. The story of Sassoon’s life is sufficiently dramatic that the mere description of its main events plays like a movie. At a London theatre that’s presenting the Diaghilev ballet set to Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” Sassoon’s poem about that performance, “Concert-Interpretation,” is heard in voice-over on the soundtrack as the stage curtain rises, and the image yields not a performance of ballet but black-and-white archival footage showing-as the poem relates-the preparations for war. From the very start, Davies displays both the originality of his methods and their overarching design. Davies crafts simple and startling effects to conjure the relentless presence of Sassoon’s traumatic memories in the course of his daily life and amid its intimate dramas and creative furies. Throughout the movie, the war is an open wound in Sassoon’s mind, and, as he advances in age and the world moves on, the wound torments him ever more. The story in “Benediction” begins in 1914 and ends in the nineteen-sixties, and its framework is chronological, though the movie is filled with audacious leaps in time, both ahead and back. ![]() Sassoon lived from 1886 to 1967, and was already a writer of note by the time that the First World War began. The result is a grand-scale melodrama that embodies its protagonist’s artistic power and intimate passion along with the devastating experience of war and the oppressions of what passed for normalcy in law and mores. Sassoon’s art was transfigured and his public image forged by the First World War, and the movie brings his experiences of history to life with a documentary-like implant of artifacts. Davies’s new film, “Benediction,” which opens Friday, is an inside-out bio-pic of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon it follows many of the familiar contours of the genre, but, above all, it renders the poet’s inner life by way of his aesthetic touchstones and cultural references. Malick’s response is metaphysical, Nance’s is interpersonal, and Davies’s is the most radical of all: it’s cultural. Terrence Malick, Terence Davies, and Terence Nance are all crucial innovators of film form, and their innovations all reimagine the same building block of movies: the very nature of a character. The modern cinema is, in large part, a tale of three Ter(r)ences. ![]()
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