Terence Davies does not attempt to re-create the putrid trenches of the Western Front in his new film about the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. Best remembered as mentor to Wilfred Owen, he was awarded the Military Cross for "conspicuous bravery" — shortly before he chose to boldly denounce the war as unconscionable in 1917.
Despite the explosive symphonies of mud and blood that propel films like 1917 or Dunkirk – and you may recognise the latter's Jack Lowden as the youthful Sassoon here, while ex-Doctor Who Peter Capaldi plays the poet in his autumnal years – writer-director Davies is of the belief that no re-creation, however grand the budget, can purport to get close to the awful quiddity of war.
In Benediction, the ninth feature from the great British director (who made his auspicious debut in 1988 with autobiographical tone poem Distant Voices, Still Lives), archival footage – of men who grip their bayonets and stare into the camera lens; of corpses slumped and left to rot – subs in for the combat through which Sassoon's poetic and moral consciousness was forged.
Often used for flashbacks, these degraded black-and-white images contrast the rest of the film and its various refined interiors, which are crisply rendered by cinematographer Nicola Daley. The haunting power of such fragments comes precisely from the sense that the reality they show exists at a remove of more than a century from the viewer; rather than the simulated immersion offered by works of shrapnel-studded spectacle, there is the sense of an unbridgeable gap in experience.
But in Davies's telling, Sassoon's story is as much a tragic gay romance as it is a war movie.
The death in combat of Wilfred Owen – a mere week before Armistice Day, 1918 – would leave an indelible mark on Sassoon, who was not only a mentor to the younger poet (played by Matthew Tennyson), but a suitor. Their mutual infatuation sparked in the unlikely haven of Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where they would produce some of their finest work (including Owens's Anthem for Doomed Youth, the stinging accompaniment to one of the film's documentary montages), while being treated for what would soon be termed "shell shock".
Those familiar with the filmmaker's work – his are domestic worlds of small pleasures and painful revelations – would no doubt guess him to be entirely uninterested in military strategy or the politics of any particular attack or retreat. The conflict that most concerns him in Benediction, as always, is one that plays out on the battlefield of the mind, where the self is both aggressor and casualty.
But the degree to which Davies brings Sassoon's homosexuality to the fore suggests a new candour in the septuagenarian, whose struggles with his own orientation – growing up Catholic in 1950s working class Liverpool made being gay a profoundly distressing prospect – have previously found expression in the pent-up sexual urges of his different on-screen analogues, from the prepubescent Bud of 1992's The Long Day Closes through to reclusive poet Emily Dickinson, the subject of his last film, 2016's A Quiet Passion.
"Will you stay? Just for a few more moments," Siegfried entreats Wilfred on the gravel path outside the hospital, the latter's return to the trenches imminent. Facing each other, eyes cast down, the silence is suffused with emotions that propriety prevented from being expressed. A voice offscreen beckons Wilfred; the two men are not – will never be – alone, and in place of anything more intimate a handshake must suffice as their parting gesture.
For those who are rusty on their high school history, Davies quickly snuffs out the notion of a potential reunion: Siegfried's voice over – aptly, he is the narrator of his own life – announces Wilfred's death as the car pulls away from Craiglockhart, just moments after their goodbye.
There is a similar collapsing of history in the way that Davies – who has always preferred narratives that develop according to emotional logic rather than linear time – intercuts scenes of Capaldi's Siegfried, grey of hair and pinched of face, with those of Lowden's; the young man is on a track towards an intensely embittered, unhappily married middle age, this future disaffection inscribed in the traumas of his youth.
Before he seeks absolution in the arms of Hester Gatty (Kate Phillips in her youth, then Gemma Jones) and finally Jesus, Siegfried tries out smooth-talking entertainer Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine, who wouldn't look out of place in a 90s erotic thriller), swishy socialite Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), and theatre actor Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth) – his entanglements revealing the Wildean subset of London's cultured upper crust; the privileged few able to cruise soirees and restaurants with near impunity.
These men dazzle the poet, but ultimately prove too changeable, and too quick to tire of his affections.
"Who can know the secrets of a human heart?" asks Ivor airily, by way of dismissing his dalliances with others. "Usually those who don't have one," comes Siegfried's sour reply. (What a boon that Benediction offers Davies a chance to indulge his sharp wit, obscured in his more languorous work.)
Like A Quiet Passion, in which Cynthia Nixon played Dickinson, Benediction is a portrait of an artist passed over in their time, and burdened with outsider status even in their own select circles.
Of the 1800-odd poems Dickinson penned in her lifetime, only a handful were published, while Sassoon's work – though it exhibited a frankness of style and subject matter that influenced the modernists – was rendered outmoded by the arrival of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. ("Eliot got the Order of Merit – and the Nobel Prize," sniffs Capaldi's Siegfried. "I've had to make do with the Queen's Award for Poetry.")
And Sassoon, like Dickinson, would increasingly choose monastic retreat over life's barrage of cruelties and complexities.
Benediction might be a war movie, but the devastation wrought is of a much subtler kind.
Benediction is in cinemas now.
