TESTAMENT OF YOUTH ★★★ 1/2
It is well known that war is hell for men. Less explored, in film and literature both, is its effect on women, particularly those who choose to put themselves in its way.
Vera Brittain was one such person. Born in England in 1893, she was just starting university — against the judgment of her parents, who wanted her to marry — when hostilities erupted in Europe. She quit her studies to work as a nurse, first in Britain and later overseas.
Her 1933 memoir Testament of Youth, adapted by Juliette Towhidi (Calendar Girls), forms the spine of this film, which looks at events that shaped her later outspoken pacifism. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander plays the young Brittain, and her sterling, understated performance is the best part of what is already a strong film.
It’s hard to say much about Vikander’s career; so much of it will be unfurled in the months ahead, as she stars in a slew of films this year, including The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Tulip Fever and Adam Jones. But she has already excelled at playing outsiders: an artificial intelligence in Ex Machina; the British wife of a mad Danish king in 2012’s A Royal Affair.
Her role as Brittain is very much part of this continuum. You can see her struggling to make sense of her life, both as a headstrong woman in an age that denied so much to “the fairer sex,” and then as a witness to one of history’s bloodiest conflicts.
When one of the most important people in her life is killed, she embarks on a forensic journey to uncover just what happened. “I want to know the truth,” she tells the last man to have seen him alive, and when he explains, though clearly fearful of a hysterical reaction, he receives the opposite: “I see. Yes. That explains it.”
And yet, she is not without passion. In a scene at London’s Charing Cross station, as she catches sight of her fiancé (Kit Harington), the camera in turn catches a flurry of emotions on her face — love and tenderness and lust and fear and longing and pain, all there in the same instant and then just as instantly wiped away as she composes a mask of stern plainness.
As directed by James Kent, the film opens with an idyllic prewar scene of Vera flirting harmlessly with friends Roland (Harington) and Victor (Colin Morgan), both of whom are clearly smitten with her beauty and intelligence. But when war comes, the men all jostle to enlist — including her brother, Edward, played by Taron Egerton.
Vera, who has been grudgingly admitted by Oxford (she didn’t know she needed Latin, and so wrote an essay in German) now leaves to become a nurse, and finds that her university background makes her an outcast there as well. But she welcomes the distraction of hard work: “Little do they know, the harder they push, the more grateful I am.” Later, when she joins a field hospital in France, her patients awaken in her a renewed sense of war’s futility and inhumanity.
Brittain is a British icon, a state that does not always lend itself to nuanced filmmaking; the pull toward hagiography is often irresistible. But Testament of Youth keeps its touch light; there’s a kind of inevitability to Vera’s circumstances that must have rankled her even as it made her path clear.
And that path is grimly fascinating. Everything she knows of the war is at once secondhand and immediate. She hears tales from the front from Edward, Victor and Roland (who also wrote poetry), but she also sees up close the wounded and the dead. As a testament to her testament, her story is treated with exactly the reverence it deserves. ∂∂∂½
Everything she knows of the war is at once second-hand and immediate
Testament of Youth opens June 19 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, with other cities to follow.