In love and war: Terence Davies on Benediction

“One wants to believe – and I do believe this – that people are intrinsically good,” says Terence Davies. “But I think that people are also intrinsically bad. And that’s the difficulty in living real life. Because in a film, of course, you can control life. But you can’t control life when you’re not in a film.”

In a remarkable career now spanning nearly half a century, Davies has examined the contexts and consequences of everyday good and bad on variously constrained lives, with tenderness, stringency, wit and, yes, meticulous, rhythmic control. Establishing his name with lyrical autobiographical meditations on his post-war working-class Liverpool upbringing (Distant Voices, Still Lives, 1988; The Long Day Closes, 1992), he has since crafted an oeuvre of quietly devastating literary adaptations (The Neon Bible, 1995; The House of Mirth, 2000; The Deep Blue Sea, 2011; Sunset Song, 2015), the poetic documentary essay Of Time and the City (2008) and, most recently, lives of two poets: A Quiet Passion (2016), on Emily Dickinson, and now Benediction, on Siegfried Sassoon.

Benediction mobilises Davies’ characteristic mode and sensibility: through subtly revealing dialogue, elegant crossfades and richly ironic musical selections, memory, narrative and identity ebb and flow, with and against one another. Across three acts, we find Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden in the first two parts, and Peter Capaldi in the third) hospitalised during the Great War, at large in the upper-class interwar social whirl, then bitterly chafing against misjudged conventional domesticity in later life. Sassoon’s sexuality is to the fore. In the sanatorium, he finds an oasis of fellow feeling with Dr Rivers (Ben Daniels) and nurtures a pure love for the pure soul of Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson). Later come friendship with Oscar Wilde’s confidant Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale) and a carousel of catty affairs with the likes of Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine) and bright young thing Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch). Anton Lesser plays Tennant in later life in a compellingly ghastly teatime encounter with Sassoon, by then married, and his wife Hester (Gemma Jones)

While Davies has always been open about his own sexuality, his work hasn’t shown such overt engagement with gay subject matter since the trilogy of short films that began his career. (A boy gazes at a man in the swimming-pool showers in Children, 1976; Madonna and Child, 1980, presents a touching, tentative cottaging scene; male beauty provides a deathbed vision in 1983’s Death and Transfiguration.) When I ask Davies, on a video call, how it is that gay male subjectivity has become so central with Sassoon, he replies with a characteristic blend of pragmatism, puckish charm and self-deprecating vulnerability. “I had to look at his life and think, ‘What do I respond to?’ Obviously, he’s gay, so am I, so I responded to that. And this almost unquenchable need for validation – trying to find self-worth in other people – I’m ashamed to say I share that too. And the revelation of that is you can only find it within yourself. He never found it and, quite frankly, I don’t think I have either.”

In its interwar scenes, Benediction presents a little depicted milieu of relative visibility and security for queer identity and experience in the UK – at least among arty upper-class men. What one character refers to as “our shadow life” seems pretty well lit. “Well, Siegfried was from a privileged background,” Davies says, “and gay men got away with a lot because they were privileged. If you were middle class or working class, you could be sent to prison for three years. That’s part of his life that I think he was bloody lucky for, you know? Some of us aren’t that lucky.”

These sequences locate these characters in a lineage, from Wilde to Coward and beyond, and invite consideration of what kinds of self-realisation were possible, under what conditions and at what cost. Different people used their privilege differently. “Ivor Novello was extremely unpleasant. He was sexually venal and didn’t care how he hurt people. He represents a strand of gay men that actually does exist which is extremely unpleasant and extremely graceless. But people like Robbie Ross were genuine people who were very courageous. Robbie Ross stood by Wilde and was pursued by [Wilde’s former lover] Bosie, who just tried to destroy him. It was horrible. And if it hadn’t been for Robbie, Siegfried may have been court martialled [for his views on the war] and had he been found guilty he’d have been shot. And the fact that Robbie knew Winston Churchill’s private secretary and all that, that’s part of the privilege that I have to say I don’t like but thank God he did what he did.”

As in A Quiet Passion, slicing epigrammatic wit is a conversational constant, bolstering personal identity and social standing and serving as sword and scutcheon. “Do go and join Lady Cunard before she starts launching something,” Ross murmurs at a party. “Please don’t undermine yourself, Siegfried,” Novello drawls over dinner. “That’s what friends are for.”

Davies smiles. “I didn’t want it to be solemn. They had good lives and they had a sense of humour. And when people are funny, it’s beguiling. I think a lot of gay men are very funny, like a lot of British northern women are, and you’re beguiled by it. My elder sister had a wonderful friend called Monica who was just adorable because she was funny. My other sister Helen had a wonderful friend called Amy who had the most wonderful laugh. I remember saying to her, ‘Oh, Amy, will you just laugh?’ She was so lovely. It does temper things and, in an odd way, it deepens tragedy.”

There is an implicitly tragic sense in Benediction that the freedoms seemingly enjoyed by its queer characters ebb and flow no less than memory. Access to secure self-expression, self-determined pleasure and space to breathe are contingent and reversible, at the level of general society and within individual lives. Sassoon’s search for meaning and belonging draws him to the conventional – marriage, children, church – to the detriment of all involved. “A lot of gay men in the 30s actually did get married because they thought, ‘The love of a good woman will treat me’,” Davies notes. “That wasn’t the case and he did treat his wife badly. You’ve only got to look at early photographs of her where she looks very beautiful indeed and look at photographs when she’s in her fifties and she looks completely in despair. That’s partially Siegfried’s fault. But she was naïve as well. So those things have to be treated head on.”

Something that does not necessarily benefit from head-on treatment, Davies feels, is sex. While his work has included sex scenes (see The Deep Blue Sea and Sunset Song), the single example in Benediction comes when Sassoon and Novello are discovered in bed together by Glen Byam Shaw (Tom Blyth) in an unsensational medium shot. “I didn’t want any of those close-ups of sweating bodies that are heavily suntanned and all this heavy breathing,” Davies tuts. “When I see that, it’s so unconvincing! I think, ‘What happens if you get cramp?’ No one ever gets cramp. No one ever farts. And so I wanted to make it almost matter-of-fact. Ivor had gone to bed with someone else in front of his current lover. That was the point, not to make the sex like 54 Shades of Grey or Ecru or whatever it’s called. I definitely wanted to avoid that ’cause I think it’s a cliché and I think it’s just dull.”

Could he then imagine shooting a less clichéd sex scene, cramp and farting included? “I’m far too embarrassed! When we were doing this, I was the only one on the set who was embarrassed and I thought, ‘Why did I write the bloody thing?’ There’s a [blow job] sequence in Madonna and Child that was the same, where I was the only one who was embarrassed. Quite frankly, I’ve never been good at that kind of thing, not in real life either. Not very attractive either so never had a chance, dear.”

Which films does Davis think do sex well? “To go back as far as Laura [Otto Preminger, 1944], and her relationship with Waldo Lydecker: now, you know without being told that they don’t have sex. You just know. And that’s more interesting. Or The Night of the Hunter [Charles Laughton, 1955], where it’s almost German expressionism: there’s no sex but he’s above her with a knife and he’s going to kill her because that’s a substitute for sex. It’s always more interesting if it’s suggested. The audience become active, not passive. When everything is explicit, sex or violence, it simply tells you what you already know and, in a way, becomes offensive. But then, of course, you’re speaking to an ex-Catholic who’s full of guilt.”

Davies has spoken before of the pernicious enduring effects of his religious upbringing in a time of hegemonic homophobia, reporting that he “hated being gay. Still do. It’s ruined my life.” I ask whether this has changed at all. “No, it hasn’t because my teenage years were just misery, you know? It was a criminal offence and I was still a very devout Catholic until I was 22 and that does something to you.” He describes too being subjected to a traumatising homophobic attack on leaving the tube in south London. “This is not that long ago. A car pulled up – two young girls, two young men – and the level of abuse was unbelievable. It was such naked hatred. Had they been on the ground they would have attacked me. That affected me for many years. I made sure that when I went out, I wore nothing that could possibly attract attention. That was shocking.”

Legal equality and apparent broad improvements in social tolerance notwithstanding, Davies is ambivalent about the good and bad in people. “If you scratch the surface, I think you’ll still find a lot of racism, a lot of homophobia, a lot of misogyny and that is frightening,” he says. “White supremacism and things like that are terrifying. And look at Ukraine.” Consolations are perhaps to be found closer to home. “It’s worth having people around you whom you love and who love you. And the biggest revelation, for me anyway, was – I was loved by my family and I never, ever thought that anybody outside my family would love me and what I have found is, certainly over these last few years when I have had a lot of financial problems, that people have cared for me.” Davies’ voice cracks and he pauses for breath between words. “And that’s… very moving, really.” He’s overcome at this point and tears begin falling. It’s a deeply moving expression of love received. When the moment passes, I ask if he’d like a minute. “No, let’s go on,” he smiles, “otherwise we’ll both be moist.”

I thank him for sharing such personal experiences so generously and say that, as a queer person myself, I recognise how hard it can be to feel worthy of support in times of vulnerability. Given his past, it’s lovely to hear Davies has reached such a point. “And lovely to experience,” he replies. “And I hope you’ve found that as well in your life. One’s immediate response sometimes is defence when you have to be open about that, and that can be very hard. I suppose we have to try and protect ourselves because, as I say, I feel there’s a lot of hatred still there. But you mustn’t let the hatred negate the people who care. That is something that is very precious and we must try and feel the best of people. Most people aren’t evil or horrible. It’s only the few people who are who create so much suffering and pain. Unfortunately, those are the people in power. I don’t know what we do about that except to say ‘Grr!’” And, I suggest, to say it loudly and often. “Yes, absolutely, and in several languages!”