Bene­dic­tion

Ter­ence Davies’ eighth nar­ra­tive fea­ture begins with an ele­gy for fall­en sol­diers. As a train­load of eager young recruits depart for the West­ern Front, flick­ery black-and-white news­reel footage shows the grim fate that awaits them.

A man’s voice speaks rue­ful­ly over these scenes of hope and despair. It belongs to the film’s sub­ject, Siegfried Sas­soon (Jack Low­den), who fought in World War One and wrote poems about his expe­ri­ences. His let­ter ​‘A Soldier’s Dec­la­ra­tion’, print­ed in 1917 and con­tro­ver­sial­ly read before the House of Com­mons, was per­haps the strongest anti-war state­ment of its day. It shaped the course of its author’s life.

Although Sas­soon was to all intents and pur­pos­es a con­sci­en­tious objec­tor (a sta­tus he active­ly sought out, despite the poten­tial death sen­tence it car­ried), his priv­i­lege and grow­ing rep­u­ta­tion among the social elite saw him avoid a court-mar­tial. Instead, he was declared unfit for ser­vice and packed off to Craiglock­hart War Hos­pi­tal on the out­skirts of Edin­burgh to recuperate.

It’s at this point in the film that Sassoon’s ​“dark secret” is exposed, if only to the view­er: he was gay, and like every gay man of his gen­er­a­tion, he was forced to hide it.

In Scot­land, Sas­soon meets a shell-shocked aspir­ing poet named Wil­fred Owen (Matthew Ten­nyson), whose own provoca­tive ode of remem­brance, ​‘Dis­abled’, is read aloud by Low­den at the end of the film. Writ­ten while Owen was laid up and pub­lished posthu­mous­ly, it depicts an injured sol­dier who returns home to find him­self the sub­ject of pity; his sev­ered legs a sym­bol of impo­tence and worthlessness.

Bene­dic­tion repeat­ed­ly grap­ples with this theme. Like the paral­ysed pri­vate of Owen’s poem, Sas­soon is por­trayed as being dam­aged beyond repair – psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly if not phys­i­cal­ly – and deeply resent­ful of those who are able to car­ry on with their lives with­out fear of dis­crim­i­na­tion or sanction.

Back at Craiglock­hart, a lan­guid track­ing shot along the length of a ten­nis net sig­nals that it will soon be time for Wil­fred to return to the trench­es. Upon his leav­ing, Siegfried asks him to stay just a moment longer, to which he oblig­es. Those few snatched sec­onds, as the two men stand awk­ward­ly in the dri­ve­way, nei­ther dar­ing to cross the invis­i­ble bar­ri­er that is keep­ing them from embrac­ing, seem to last an eternity.

We know as well as they do it will be the last time they see each oth­er. Owen wrote sev­er­al oth­er poems about the hor­rors of war before his untime­ly death in 1920, and there is one which Davies does not fea­ture here whose title nonethe­less cap­tures the mourn­ful spir­it of his film. It’s called ​‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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