Benediction

seen on 24 May 2022

Terence Davies directs Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi as the younger and older Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction, which while not a 'cradle to grave' biopic nevertheless examines some of the most significant episodes in the poet's life. Davies's often oblique approach to revealing character and development is exemplified by his choice only to refer to Sassoon's provocative open letter  of 1917 denouncing the conduct of the war against Germany: we see the interview with his army superiors which led to his being sent to Craiglockhart, but there are only spoken references to its wider currency. Other directors might well have chosen to press the point with a scene in the House of Commons, but Davies is only interested in the immediate circumstances of his characters, and Sassoon was not present when his letter was read out there.

Jack Lowden gives a beautifully nuanced performance as the disillusioned soldier struggling also with what he may well have thought of as personal demons, whereas we now would say 'issues with his sexuality'. At Craiglockhart, the hospital near Edinburgh where Dr Rivers (Ben Daniels) was sympathetically trying to deal with the traumas of soldiers returning from the Western Front, Sassoon meets Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson) and they become close, though neither directly expresses his feelings towards the other. The horrors of the war intrude with the use of archive footage, and Lowden speaks Sassoon's verses with great sensitivity, also magnificently displayed in the recitation of 'Disabled', one of Owen's great poems, at the conclusion of the film.

Later, in the 1920's, Sassoon takes up with first Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and then Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), as well as being in the circle of such literary and social celebrities as Lady Ottoline Morrell (Suzanne Bertish) and Edith Sitwell (Lia Williams). These scenes give rise to some deliciously waspish barbs but the trajectory of Sassoon's life is not happy, and episodes are intercut with vignettes from the older man's life where Peter Capaldi has little more to do than be snobbish and morose. One can imagine that the consequences of regarding first the acquisition of a wife (Kate Phillips, then Gemma Jones) and then the birth of a son as 'saving him' include the slow poisoning of his temperament, but again this is only hinted at rather than directly shown. The resulting domestic scenes of the 1950s are just painful to watch: Davies is a master at showing simmering tension in people who rarely face the challenge of expressing themselves honestly, and the cruel dismissal of the older Stephen Tennant (Anton Lesser) only reinforces the notion that resentment has festered. Sassoon's late conversion to Catholicism seems only the final spasm of a man desperately trying to quell the inner turmoil of his life.

Despite the shallow brittleness of the bright young things of the 1920s, and the stultifying domestic environment a generation later, the film evinces great sympathy for its protagonist, and the quality of the acting ensures that it is compelling to watch.

Belfast

seen on 27 January 2022

Kenneth Branagh wrote and directed this film partly based on his own childhood experiences living in the increasingly fraught atmosphere of Belfast in 1969, before his family moved to England. The film, beautifully photographed in black and white by Haris Zambarloukos, shows the poisonous tensions destroying the interconnectedness of a working class street when sectarian strife erupts, barriers are built, and the British Army begins its hapless involvement in the Troubles.

Almost everything we see is refracted through the eyes of young Buddy (a remarkable performance by newcomer Jude Hill), who lives in the street with his Ma (Caitriona Balfe) and Pa (Jamie Dornan), though the latter is often absent working in England, and his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie). His attempts to understand the mysteries of Catholicism show the entirely convincing misapprehensions of a young child faced with something his Protestant parents frankly cannot explain. He is completely puzzled by the arcane circularity of an older friend's description of belonging to a gang. In the classroom his efforts to shine are mostly motivated by the desire to sit closer to a girl who smiles at him, who is always in the most favoured academic position (the teacher rearranges the class seating order every week according to the ranking of homework marks - her decision to seat the brightest closest to the front would probably not pass muster today). His beloved Pop (Ciarán Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench) look after him some of the time, and all seems well.

However, sometimes he witnesses agonised phone conversations between his Ma and absent Pa, or face to face arguments when Pa is home, and he and his brother have to be instructed on how to react to demands from people his father does not trust. He knows there is talk of moving, and that his Ma is unwilling to exchange the familiar street with the unknown strangeness of England; only an external crisis resolves the issue. A way of life is disappearing around him but he cannot really know this; while we can infer the bigotry from a hellfire sermon, Buddy can only draw a road and try to remember which way he should take when it forks. Where we can cringe at the incipient thuggishness of some of the sectarians (Colin Morgan plays a superficially glamorous enforcer), Buddy just negotiates the barriers and plays with his friends. 

It's a finely judged tribute to a way of life that must have seemed entirely natural and secure, but which turned out to be fatally fragile in the face of wider events. The moody monochrome perfectly matches the nostalgic look at a vanished world; it is only broken by brilliant touches of  colour when Buddy is in the cinema (One Million Years BC and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) or attending the Christmas pantomime with his Granny, where the stage is in colour even though the audience is in black and white (except for the reflection of stage lights on Granny's glasses). It's this attention to technical details as much as the wonderfully understated performances that makes this examination of a perpetually difficult subject so compelling.

West Side Story

seen on 18 January 2022

Was it just the excitement of attending a cinema? Or the pleasure of attending a cinema with a friend? I have done both these things last November. But with Steven Spielberg's new version of West Side Story there was an added exhilaration almost from the first moments as Leonard Bernstein's music started, the fingers of the Jets began clicking as they walked through the demolition sites which were encroaching on their turf, and the heady adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet story took off.

With a few new twists to the story provided by playwright Tony Kushner and a startlingly fresh cast led by newcomer Rachel Zegler and fresh-faced heart-throb Ansel Eglort as Maria and Tony, Ariana DeBose as Anita, and a touching new role written in for Rita Moreno (the original Anita in 1961) as an elderly shopkeeper who has taken on Tony as an employee after his time in prison, the film is full of energy and passion, driven by the wonderfully rhythmic score but slowing in the right places for the emerging but dangerous love between Tony and Maria to be expressed in the softer lyrics Stephen Sondheim provided for them.

The film is still set in the 1950s, with the slums of the West Side fated for demolition ironically to prepare the way for the Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts, home now of the Metropolitan Opera, and one of Bernstein's stamping grounds. Once that nice irony has been flagged everything is concentrated on the turf battles between the Jets and the Sharks, the prejudice against Puerto Ricans, the intensely tribal mores of the men and the difficult loyalties of the women. The camerawork is sharp, the choreography by Justin Peck sharper, evoking at times the original work by Jerome Robbins, but adding a grittier flare in place of the often stylised presentation of the older film. Rachel Zegler's Maria is beautifully poised, while Ansel Eglort's Tony is engagingly lovestruck though his fresh-faced good looks make it hard to believe he has survived fifteen months in the gruelling US prison system even as a juvenile (one of the new narrative twists which is used to help explain his reluctance to re-enter the gang culture of his friends).

I came out of the cinema determined to get hold of the DVD when it is released.