To mark the release of Terence Davies’ latest film Benediction, we are thrilled to welcome the acclaimed director onto The Cinema of Ideas on 24 May to discuss the making of the film and his reflections on a long career as one of Britain’s foremost film poets. Alongside this free talk, from 20 May- 2 June we will be screening The Terence Davies Trilogy: a collection of three powerful short autobiographical films made by Davies at the very start of his career. Register here.
In this blog, the Barbican’s Alex Davidson considers Benediction in the context of The Terence Davies Trilogy and Davies’ wider filmography – an incredible body of work which includes some of the most beautiful and haunting images in the history of British cinema.
Terence Davies is incapable of being dull. Any chance you get to read (or, better, see) an interview with him is time well spent, with quotable lines spicing thoughtful insights on Britain, on history, on artistry, on repression. And that goes double for his films, an astonishingly rich body of work that is utterly distinct from anything else in British cinema.
His career begins with a triple punch: three featurette-length works called Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), which together comprise The Terence Davies Trilogy.
Many of Davies’ favourite tropes and themes are contained in these films – life experiences from boyhood to late adulthood, a fascination with death, the great potential for cruelty in men and kindness in women, a guarded relationship to homosexuality, the oppression of Catholicism (Davies himself is a lapsed catholic).
All recur in Benediction (2021), his marvellous imagining of key moments in the life of poet Siegfried Sassoon. We are introduced to Sassoon at a key stage in his young adulthood, as an idealistic rebel, outspoken on the wickedness of war. The death of Wilfred Owen, the young poet with whom he forges a deep bond at a military hospital, will change Sassoon forever. Later he will start doomed romances with male lovers, who treat him appallingly, particularly Ivor Novello (as interpreted by Jeremy Irvine); Sassoon’s wife, played by Kate Phillips as a young woman, is a far more sympathetic character. In later life he converts to Catholicism, to the scorn of his son.
In the Trilogy we meet Robert Tucker, partly based on Davies himself, at three different stages of his life: as a child, as an adult and as an old man. The different actors cast in the roles do not resemble each other, nor are they meant to. Throughout Davies’ work, characters age dramatically and metamorphosise not just physically but spiritually, often in a very short time frame. In The Neon Bible (1995), a boy transforms into a man before our eyes in just a few seconds, shooting up in age and height through an uncanny visual effect. A similar visual trick is played, with more sophistication, in A Quiet Passion (2016), where the Dickinson family, sitting for photographs, morph into their older selves.
The transformation may not be just physical. In Sunset Song (2015), the farm girl’s husband, a passionate, caring young man, goes to fight in WWI and returns a damaged, violent monster, unrecognisable from the man she fell in love with. In Benediction too, little effort is made to make Jack Lowden (playing the young Sassoon) and Peter Capaldi (the older Sassoon) look or even sound like each other, but this is Davies’ point. Trauma has changed Sassoon forever – his younger and older selves may as well be strangers.
I’ve seen Benediction described as the director’s first gay film, by an author who clearly wasn’t paying attention. How did she miss the furtive glance from the boy to an older lad showering in Children? The unforgettable depictions of gay sexual expression, some of it possibly fantasised, in Madonna and Child? The hot, shirtless builder’s cheeky wink to young Bud in The Long Day Closes (1992), an innocent gesture that provokes a crisis in the protagonist?
Terence Davies’ personal takes on his own homosexuality are unflinchingly brutal. Take this line from a 2011 interview for The Irish Times: “Being gay has ruined my life. I hate it. I’ll go to my grave hating it.” Or from a 2015 interview from The Guardian, when, after discussing Catholic guilt, he moves onto his discovery of being gay: “That was even worse, that was beyond the grace of God. It was awful… I have hated being gay, and I’ve been celibate for most of my life”.
Such declarations of self-loathing are tough to read from a man who has made some of the most beautiful, the most haunting and the most poetic British films to light up a cinema. And some of the most beautiful queer images, too.
One of Davies’ shrewdest observations in Benediction is showing how damaging it can be for an outsider to conform to society’s norms. Sassoon sets himself many traps in Benediction and steps into them all: he enters a loveless marriage, cementing himself into that prison by having a child he seems to despise, and eventually embraces Catholicism, a religion that historically has been viciously unkind to queer people.
Music has played an important part to all of his films from the start of his career. Doris Day’s gentle, poignant It All Depends on You accompanies the funeral of Robert Tucker’s mother in Death and Transfiguration. The wonderful, plentiful pub singalongs in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), invite you into the happiest times of the family – the film at times feels like a musical. There is a gorgeous tracking shot in The Long Day Closes, beginning up high above the cellar steps and moving into the cinema auditorium, the church pews and the classroom and then back to the streets, backed by Debbie Reynold’s warm rendition of Tammy, which may be the loveliest moment in his entire filmography. I’ve watched that sequence a hundred times.
In Benediction, music offers moments of great joy, while also revealing the trappings of class. The female music hall performer’s bawdy rendition of Waiting at the Church for the troops is infinitely more fun and full of life than Ivor Novello’s smarmy performance of And Her Mother Came Too, rewarded with the mannered titters of an aristocrat’s party guests.
Of course, it is poetry, rather than music, that is the key art form represented in Benediction, and this is where Davies achieves something truly magical. Poetry is fiendishly hard to translate to cinema. Even great directors falter. Bright Star (2009), a biopic exploring the last years of Keats, is the least interesting film of Jane Campion’s career. Peter Weir’s Dead Poet’s Society (1989) may make the viewer wish to never read another poem ever again.
But in Benediction the poems punch, hard, culminating in a recital of Disabled, a poem not by Sassoon, but by Wilfred Owen. This bleak, harrowing poem is interpreted visually by Davies through a shot of Sassoon as an old man, sitting on a bench, then to a man in a wheelchair, then a shot of young men and women ambling through a park, then back to the man in the wheelchair, and finally an extended shot of Sassoon, now young, back on the bench. This simple, symmetrical sequence potently surfaces the nuances of the poem, simultaneously capturing the essence of Sassoon himself. It’s an overwhelming moment, for Sassoon, and for us.
Ultimately, according to Davies, the few moments Sassoon shared with Owen were the only real love the man ever experienced. A ‘what if’ that would haunt him forever. The astonishing final scene of Death and Transfiguration sees Robert Tucker as an old man, dying in his hospice bed. He reaches out at the last image he sees before death – the silhouette of a handsome man, who turns to face him. The screen fades to white. Benediction does not close with Sassoon’s death but does suggest that when Owen was killed in battle, part of Sassoon died with him. He weeps, alone, on the park bench. The screen fades, this time to black.
You can watch The Terence Davies Trilogy on the Cinema of Ideas from 20 May – 2 June. At 6:30pm on 24 May, join us for a live conversation with Terence Davies and BFI Flare’s Brian Robinson. You can register for both here.
Alex Davidson is a cinema curator at the Barbican, a former programmer for JW3 and a former curator for the BFI National Archive. He has written for a variety of publications, including Sight & Sound, the Guardian and Time Out, and given cinema talks and presentations across the UK. His specialism is queer cinema and television.