The opening shot, a travelling overhead crane shot, is a horrific horizonless panorama of a WWI battlefield of gunpowder-gray mud and embedded bodies -- a sight never thereafter equalled or approached. The scene soon shifts to a Scottish "loony bin" for some somber contemplation, in well-crafted dialogue, of the high cost of war; and the harmonizing photography is in such muted tones that you might often feel you forgot to remove your sunglasses at the entrance of the auditorium. The main focus is on one psychologist and two patients, a mute asthmatic amnesiac and a perfectly sane, war-protesting, homosexual poet. The latter was a real person of some fame, Siegfried Sassoon, and his more famous fellow poet and patient, Wilfred Owen, is a minor character whom we could wish was major. (Another fellow poet, Robert Graves, is even more minor.) The commonplace character of the mute amnesiac who regains first his speech and then his memory, and acquires a local lady friend in between, doesn't pull his weight. Based on a Pat Barker novel; with Jonathan Pryce, Jonny Lee Miller, James Wilby, Tanya Allen, Stuart Bunce; directed by Gillies Mackinnon. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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