A Quiet Passion focuses on Emily Dickinson and the cloistered world of her family home in a nineteenth-century New England college town. If only snippets of her poetry are quoted on the soundtrack, there are some vivid shots of Dickinson at work on her famously introspective, astringent verse. That was the abiding ‘quiet passion’ of her quiet life, and her pursuit of it is evoked as effectively as the medium of cinema will allow. Benediction centres on Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), also famous for his impassioned verse, though it was in a different register and prompted by very different circumstances: what he witnessed as a soldier on the far from quiet, far from cloistered battlefields of World War I. The focus is less intense than in A Quiet Passion, as the narrative and settings broaden into a jumble of vignettes of Sassoon’s hedonistic social milieu in the interwar years, his torrid, torrential sexual passions, his retreat into a marriage that ends in disquiet, and his conversion to Catholicism – which may (or may not) provide him with the state of blessedness alluded to in the film’s title. There are more obvious opportunities here than in its predecessor for an ‘inherently cinematic’ approach to the main subject, to borrow a phrase from one reviewer of A Quiet Passion. Yet the ways in which Davies takes up these opportunities lapse all too often into indulgent distractions and easy stereotyping.

Sassoon the writer, whether of war poetry or his equally celebrated fictionalised memoirs published in the 1920s and 1930s, is all but forgotten after the opening sequences. Davies, the writer as well as director of the film, becomes preoccupied with, completely dazzled by, the ambience: the lush, louche glamour of the patrician and bohemian circles in which his subject moved. He’s attuned to its superficialities and cruelties, but there’s a part of him that can’t help fixating on them, playing them up with a kind of delighted horror, to the cost of any complexity of characterisation and dialogue. A social outsider to this world, he is at risk of being seduced by it and, if unwittingly, of seducing us – outsiders in time – with his lavish visual recreations. Nostalgia rules and lures, as it never did in A Quiet Passion. 

Soldier, poet, and author Siegfried Sassoon (photograph by George C. Beresford)

Smart parties and bedroom liaisons get far more attention than everyday professional or domestic life, not just in Sassoon’s case but also in that of his A-list lovers. The Hon. Stephen Tennant made something of a career out of his dandy-dilettante posturings, but his rival in sybaritic caddishness, Ivor Novello, happened to be a dedicated composer, lyricist, and actor as well. He was A-list primarily because of his music, but this side of Novello is reduced in the film to his entertaining a few famous guests with a rendition of one of his most famous songs, ‘And Her Mother Came Too’. In Robert Altman’s country-house capriccio, Gosford Park (2001), the Novello character obliges us with the same song but with four or five of his less well-known ones as well. Subsequently, for variety, Davies resorts to such tired old standards as ‘The Charleston’ and ‘Tea for Two’. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, no slouches in the nostalgia department, evoke the same period much more subtly and inventively with their choice of song numbers in Savages (1972) and Quartet (1981).

Images of the famous lovers, guests, and friends that populate Benediction are also straight from stock: Edith Sitwell in her turquoise turban, Lady Ottoline Morrell in her avian finery. Even so, among other clunky info-dumps in the script, Davies insists on dropping their names, just in case we don’t pick up on who they are. And the repartee between them is remorselessly arch and clipped, as if they talked in nothing but aphoristic putdowns. (My favourite exchange, more Noël Coward than Novello: ‘How was Bavaria?’ ‘Bavarian.’) There are so many toxic barbs flying around you might wonder why the film was not called ‘Malediction’. Some relief is provided by the gentler, poignant scenes featuring Sassoon’s relatively unfamous mother or his youthful and enchanted, then ageing and disenchanted, wife – radiant performances, respectively, from Geraldine James, Kate Phillips, and Gemma Jones. Genuinely moving, too, are the tenderly erotic exchanges at the beginning of the film between the young Sassoon (Jack Lowden) and his fellow soldier and poet, Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), and the rueful flash-forwarded reflections of the older Sassoon (a wizened Peter Capaldi). The rest of the cast are every bit as accomplished, but they can’t save the long middle sequences from a pervasive air of the highly confected: pastiche at its most brittle.

No critic would wish a film director to stay forever on his home turf, but Benediction nonetheless made me pine for those lovingly incandescent Davies films about his childhood and youth in the distinctly unglamorous backblocks of an industrial suburb: unashamedly nostalgic in themselves, but for times and places that the director has personally known, and suffused in their lyrical, elegiac intensity with a true sort of visual poetry.

Benediction was featured at the 2021 British Film Festival, and is coming soon to cinemas.