Compelling tale of women in war
It is well known that war is hell for men. Less explored, in both film and literature, is its effect on women, particularly those who put themselves in harm’s way.
Vera Brittain was one such person. Born in England in 1893, she was just starting university when hostilities erupted in Europe. She quit her studies to work as a nurse.
Her 1933 memoir, Testament of Youth, 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.
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.
In a scene at London’s Charing Cross station, as she catches sight of her fiancé (Kit Harington), the camera 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.
Vera, who has been grudgingly admitted by Oxford, now leaves to become a nurse, and finds her university background makes her an outcast there as well. But she welcomes the distraction of hard work. Later, when she joins a field hospital in France, her patients awaken in her a renewed sense of war’s futility and inhumanity.
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 second-hand and immediate. She hears tales from the front, but she also sees up close, the wounded and the dead. As a testament to her testament, this film treats her story with exactly the reverence it deserves.