Davies’ final feature finds the director revisiting and reimagining images, techniques, and ideas from throughout his career to remarkable effect
Terence Davies’ first feature, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), opens with the sound of shipping forecasts on the radio and it asks us to perform some mental recalibration. To appreciate or even notice Davies’ work, one needs to turn their dials away from the drab kitchen sink frequencies that their setting and palette might suggest to find an altogether stranger and more elusive station, one whose playlist ranges from hymns to standards to country western tunes. The rhythms of Davies’ films are not the familiar ones of most narrative cinema. More often they call to mind the ineffable, imperfect stream of memory. A truly one-of-a-kind style made Davies’ films easy to appreciate, difficult to describe, and all but impossible to categorize.
While just as visually inventive as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger at their best, Davies was not as prolific or acclaimed as the Archers. Though he more than deserved fame, he didn’t leap across the pond to Hollywood and secure household recognition like Alfred Hitchcock. Despite memorably adapting literary classics, his name has not become shorthand for a tradition of filmmaking like Ismail Merchant’s or his partner James Ivory’s. Perhaps because he mostly avoided social commentary, he didn’t win a single Palme d’Or award, let alone two, like his polemical countryman Ken Loach. When asked to contemplate British cinema, one might first think of Carol Reed or Carry On, Ealing comedies or Hammer horror films. Davies’ spare filmography provides enough evidence, however, to say that Great Britain lost its greatest-ever filmmaker when the world lost him in October of 2023.
Michael Koresky’s 2014 book exploring Davies’ career does plenty of justice to the director’s initial trio of shorts, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980), and Death and Transfiguration (1983), collectively known as the Terence Davies Trilogy, as well as each of the features released through 2013’s The Deep Blue Sea. Nevertheless, the volume remains inherently incomplete because Davies continued working. With three features, a pair of shorts, and adaptations of his own poetry, the final decade of Davies’ life proved one of his most prolific and, I’d argue, his most interesting. Speaking to Harlan Kennedy for American Cinema Papers upon the release of Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies said he had just one autobiographical film left in him. It would ultimately become The Long Day Closes (1992), an exploration of the years between the death of his father and the onset of puberty. Davies’ body of work and the lives of his fans are infinitely richer because the director proved himself wrong. On more than one occasion, he described A Quiet Passion (2016) and Benediction (2021), the pair of biopics about poets — Emily Dickinson and Siegfried Sassoon — that would ultimately close out his career, as perhaps his most autobiographical films.
In his obituary for Davies, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody contends that the director “never made a ‘late’ film; no work of his suggests a detached philosophical overview or a foot in the beyond.” I disagree. His earliest trilogy of shorts is so haunted by mortality — Part 1 closes with a hearse driving off, Part 3 with a death rattle — that Davies has never had both feet planted in this plane. Making his feature debut in his 40s and fighting for funds throughout a too-short career, Davies only made late-style films. Each is so idiosyncratic and packed with insights about its maker that you’d expect it was released toward the end of a long, artistic life. The latest is, naturally, the latest. Death-obsessed and rife with irreconcilable contradictions, Benediction finds Davies reflective and reflexive, mining his biography and his previous films to better tell Siegfried Sassoon’s (Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi) story.
It’s ironic that Davies opens the film with a title card establishing our time and place in history: London in 1914, a performance of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring. More than perhaps any of his features, Benediction is discursive. To quote an American veteran of the Second World War, its protagonist seems “unstuck in time.” Though both of its timelines move chronologically, we move between them freely, continually losing our foothold and sense of security in the present moment. An early sequence in the film, a point on its earlier Jack Lowden-starring timeline, sees Siegfried’s mother visit him in hospital while he recovers from trench fever. They both lament the recent loss of Hamo, Siegfried’s brother, but the soldier whose men called him “Mad Jack” for his almost suicidal fearlessness under fire discourages his mother from wallowing in her mourning. “There’s only one thing worse than remaining in the past,” Siegfried remarks, “and that’s begrudging the future.” The latter of the film’s timelines sees Siegfried do plenty of both. Throughout, we’re brought back into the past and repeatedly asked to contemplate archival footage, even casualty statistics. Toward the end of the film George Sassoon (Richard Goulding) asks his father, “Why do you hate the modern world?” The elder Sassoon (now played by Peter Capaldi) replies, “Because it’s younger than I am.”
Davies employs a remarkable visual effect to accelerate the passage of time toward the end of A Quiet Passion’s first act. As the camera slowly zooms into Zoe Bell, Rose Williams, Benjamin Wainwright, and Keith Carradine, each actor’s visage, save for Carradine’s, morphs into that of another actor. They become the elder versions of Emily Dickinson and her family. Bell becomes Cynthia Nixon, Williams becomes Jennifer Ehle, and so on. Despite the subtle joke about the time-intensive nature of photography in the 19th century and Carradine’s more overt laugh-line (“I am smiling!”), the effect is mostly melancholy. We are watching time act upon our characters, not just pass them by. The penetrative or pressurizing motion of the camera’s slow zoom suggests that time is literally reaching toward them, taking hold, and changing their shape. When Davies reuses the same trick in Benediction’s early going, the effect evolves from melancholy to downright heartbreaking. Davies preempts our reasonable questions about how one actor manages to age into another who looks almost nothing like him. The camera turns a semi-circle as we watch Lowden’s broad, ingratiating face contract into Capaldi’s pursed scowl. An impossible transformation happens before our very eyes as age and anguish wisen Sassoon’s visage, sour his outlook, and leave him grasping for whatever redemption he might still find. The counter-clockwise motion of this turn also introduces a paradox at this key moment in the cinematic Sassoon’s life, as we move backward and forward at once.
This peculiar flash-forward concludes one of Benediction’s most arresting sequences, the one which most clearly articulates the reasoning behind Sassoon’s late-in-life decision to convert to Catholicism and Davies’ own sense of kinship with his final protagonist. “Riders in the Sky” scores footage of WWI soldiers running from trench to trench in futile pursuit of earthly glory. “So cowboy, change your ways,” sings Vaughn Monroe, “Or with us you will ride / The ghost herd in the sky.” The song recounts an episode like Paul’s fateful trip to Damascus, transporting it to the American frontier, and comes straight from Davies’ own past. In interviews to support Benediction’s release, he recalled how a family friend would sing the song on Sunday afternoons while nursing a bottle of pale ale. “It’s about redemption,” he said repeatedly, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly acknowledging his own pursuit of the same. Speaking to Marya E. Gates, for example, Davies said, “I’ve been searching for [redemption] for 76 years and I’ve never found it.”
The younger Siegfried’s bid for redemption involves denouncing the British war effort and renouncing his post in an open letter. We hear Lowden charge his superiors with “prolonging the War by failing to state their conditions for peace” and watch more stock footage. Thanks to some convenient connections (and despite his protests), Siegfried is sent to Craiglockhart Hospital rather than facing a court martial and potential execution. Here he meets the sympathetic Dr. W.H.R. Rivers (Ben Daniels) and Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson), with whom he forms a powerful bond. The sequence just before Owen leaves for the trenches (never to return) sees Davies again employ a paradoxical mix of motion and stasis. An overhead shot of Siegfried and Owen swimming in circles suggests their efforts to turn back the clock and keep the present moment going just a little longer. Siegfried expresses this sentiment more directly in the next sequence when he asks Wilfred to wait “just a few more moments” before boarding his transport.
Compared to someone like Dickinson, Sassoon, his first social insider, may look like an unusual choice of protagonist for Davies. His active social and sex life certainly stands in sharp contrast to Dickinson’s housebound celibacy. Davies says, however, that the poet’s relative outsider status helped encourage him to dramatize it. The poet directly expresses his unease among his moneyed set when he reads “When I’m Among a Blaze of Lights.” The crowd doesn’t seem to notice that this bitter reflection on the diminishing returns of drinking and rubbing elbows with the upper crust takes aim at them. For Emily, poems offered “solace for the eternity that surrounds us all,” but Davies offers no suggestion that Sassoon’s art serves a similar purpose. We never see Sassoon at work or enjoying the fruits of his artistic labor. Instead, we see him reflect on the paucity of his accolades. “Eliot got the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize,” an aged Siegfried complains, “I’ve had to make do with the Queen’s Award for Poetry.” Siegfried’s son quips that the strongest argument against such honorifics is the sort of people who’ve earned them and the poet seems to agree. Still, however much he recognizes the absurdity of laurels and titles, “Sir Siegfried Sassoon would have been nice.”
Whatever Siegfried’s complaints about relative obscurity, he was popular and acclaimed as a poet in his time. Davies joked in interviews that Sassoon “knew everyone” and said that turning his eventful life into a biopic was largely an exercise in excision. When a 1918 war wound leaves Sassoon laid up in the hospital, he reports visits from luminaries like Winston Churchill and Noël Coward. All the while, his book Counter-Attack is selling and his fame is spreading. Even Sassoon’s sexuality fails to fully queer his social standing. Though homosexuality was illegal in the United Kingdom until 1967, Sassoon lives more or less openly, taking partners out to dinner and home to his mother. For the first time since his early shorts, Davies gets an opportunity to reflect on his own sexuality, which he said had “ruined [his] life.” True to Davies’ conflicted feelings, living openly does not mean living happily for Siegfried. Doomed affairs with Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), a popular songwriter and actor whose cruel eyes give Mother Sassoon pause, and Stephen Tennant (Calem Turner), a socialite whose outsized vanity frustrates Siegfried, especially wound our protagonist. We get the sense that Siegfried might prefer it if living openly didn’t mean living “out in the open.” His first tryst with Ivor is interrupted by Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth) and Siegfried learns more than he’d like to about both Ivor and Stephen’s relationships with other men. He soon finds himself in Glen’s position, the jilted lover leaving the same pair of keys on Ivor’s floor. Like Glen, he eventually decides to marry, a decision Stephen calls “the ultimate capitulation.”
Hester (Kate Phillips) and Siegfried’s performance of wedded bliss looks especially unconvincing when the poet shows off the infant George to adoring friends. For a moment, we’re reminded of another biopic of a soldier, Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper. During a much-mocked sequence from Eastwood’s near-masterpiece, Bradley Cooper’s Chris Kyle holds his newborn child, obviously a doll. Cooper infamously even wiggles the doll’s arm in an unconvincing attempt to suggest a living, breathing baby. The Sassoons’ child looks just as fake. We can’t help but notice we’re not looking at a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, but just the swaddling clothes alone. In both sequences, a loving family looks undeniably like a mere prop. Sassoon may not consider his civvies a costume the way Kyle seems to have, but he’s just as surely play-acting. The ensuing dance inspires a look through Siegfried’s romantic history as he and Hester’s reflections transform, first into an older version of themselves (Gemma Jones steps in for Phillips), next into the younger Siegfried and Ivor, and finally into Siegfried and Stephen. A rosier trip down memory lane might have seen Siegfried recall his tango with Wilfred. We’re not just reminded of time’s pitiless march but asked to associate Hester with two partners who proved similarly poor matches for our hero.
Characters who meant more to Siegfried appear from beyond the grave for a standout sequence, the final example of what is arguably Davies’ signature image — a character looking through a window. It proves the ultimate iteration in every sense, Davies at his most tragic and ecstatic. A despairing middle-aged Siegfried conjures the dead with a reading of his “Invocation.” The younger Siegfried’s voice reads most of the poem, but Capaldi interrupts twice. First, he says, “I stood with the dead,” and the faces of departed loved ones begin to dissolve in as if projected against the panes beside Siegfried. Dr. Rivers, Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale), Siegfried’s mother, and Wilfred Owen appear from beyond the grave to smile at us. Siegfried makes no sign that he can see them. His face remains unchanged and his hands stay at his side. The figures’ ghostly translucence suggests the impossibility of making contact even if Siegfried tried. That they look out at us and not toward Sigfried provides another painful reminder that they are gone from his life forever. Siegfried is ultimately left alone in the leftmost pane as Capaldi’s voice returns to say, “Rising, rising the voices of the muffled dead.” We’ve seen plenty of dead people over the last few minutes but only heard the poet’s voice. Davies must mean for us to count Siegfried among the departed, perhaps as one of the wartime casualties we’ll soon hear about. We learn each country’s Great War losses while Siegfried sits out in the yard and archival footage of battlefields and wounded soldiers flickers behind him, dwarfing his figure and presumably overwhelming his memory.
Siegfried walks through his past and suddenly changes into his younger self again for the film’s final sequence. As he reads Wilfred Owen’s “Disabled,” he stares at a young soldier whom the poem could describe. Davies dramatizes scenes from the poem’s past, perhaps a young man in a wheelchair’s memories or dreams. It’s the longest look Davies offers at the kind of peace World War I disrupted, almost taunting in its blissfulness. Upon the poem’s conclusion, Sassoon begins to sob as Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” swells. The protracted sequence suggests not only generational trauma but also the impossibility of personal or national redemption in the aftermath of such world-changing bloodshed.
While the sobbing Sassoon may have offered a fitting conclusion to Davies’ filmmaking career, Passing Time, his collaboration with Uruguayan composer Florencia Di Concilio for Film Fest Gent, constitutes an even more appropriate coda. Davies reads his own poem, dedicated to the memory of his sister Maisie, over a single shot taken near his home in Essex.
So if you let me know you’re there
In silence’s embrace
Breath a sigh and tell me so
For you are gone and not replaced.
Though the camera never moves, the image is far from static. Insects, leaves, and shadows dance as if blown by heavenly sighs, perhaps in answer to Davies’ pleas. Passing Time’s final fade to black feels fittingly like saying goodbye for now.
But echoes of your lovely self
Will bear us through life’s cruel stream
And if I am to join you there
Oh, what joy your face will bring!
Oh tell me now!
Oh tell me all!
For my poor heart with tears is ringed.
James Dowling, a manager of the Davies estate, and the Centre Pompidou produced Home! Home! (2024) as part of a posthumous retrospective last year. They called Passing Time an inspiration and recruited Simon Russell Beale to read a selection of Davies’ poems, but the superficially similar tribute only reminds viewers what they’ve lost. It’s just a faint echo of Terence Davies’ lovely self.
Stream Benediction on Kanopy
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