Benediction by Terence Davies, 2 hours plus on Siegfried Sassoon and his coterie in WW1 and after.
To be fair, it's not easy to make cinema about a poet/aesthete/society figure, especially if most of what he does is to walk into and out of drawing rooms and salons. What's even more difficult in the case of Sassoon is that the defining event of his life (his refusal to continue fighting in World War 1 ) happens at the start of his film, so what's there to say after that?
That could be a theme in itself: early promise followed by a lifetime of comfortable dissipation, but I'm not convinced you would choose to make a film about it, rather than a book say. In this case, Sassoon's failure to connect with Wilfred Owen, and his inability to see Owen except through Sassoon' s class limitations is movingly depicted despite the thinness of the Owen character.
But then the film moves into endless scenes of Sassoon gadding about with and bedding many lookalike and interchangeable artistic young men, all of whom speak in sub Wildean aphorisms. That's when you really feel the 2 hours. The lead Jack Lowden is a handsome fella and I could have done with more gratuitous sex with him and less wandering in and out of rooms a la Acorn Antiques.
Mind you, the film left me wanting to read Sassoon and Owen again after a long time unread, so maybe job done?
To be fair, it's not easy to make cinema about a poet/aesthete/society figure, especially if most of what he does is to walk into and out of drawing rooms and salons. What's even more difficult in the case of Sassoon is that the defining event of his life (his refusal to continue fighting in World War 1 ) happens at the start of his film, so what's there to say after that?
That could be a theme in itself: early promise followed by a lifetime of comfortable dissipation, but I'm not convinced you would choose to make a film about it, rather than a book say. In this case, Sassoon's failure to connect with Wilfred Owen, and his inability to see Owen except through Sassoon' s class limitations is movingly depicted despite the thinness of the Owen character.
But then the film moves into endless scenes of Sassoon gadding about with and bedding many lookalike and interchangeable artistic young men, all of whom speak in sub Wildean aphorisms. That's when you really feel the 2 hours. The lead Jack Lowden is a handsome fella and I could have done with more gratuitous sex with him and less wandering in and out of rooms a la Acorn Antiques.
Mind you, the film left me wanting to read Sassoon and Owen again after a long time unread, so maybe job done?
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