– Film Review –
– By Cate Marquis –
“Testament of Youth” was a memoir of young British nurse in World War I that expressed the experience of a generation for a war that transformed both that generation and the world. The war took place near the start of the new century, as women were asserting themselves and old institutions were showing cracks. By its end, the war had wiped away the old monarchies of Europe, ushered in the Russian Revolution and devastated the economies of Europe. The Great War, as it was called before there was a second one, had a much bigger personal impact in Europe than in the U.S., nearly wiping out a generation of young men in Britain, France and Germany.
The film “Testament of Youth” adapts Vera Brittain’s groundbreaking memoir of her World War I experiences for the big screen. A lush period drama, the film stars Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain, along with Kit Harington and Taron Egerton.
The film takes Brittain from a determined young woman whose ambition is attend college, a rarity for women at the time, despite her parents’ opposition, to a nurse working in the battlefield hospitals of one of the bloodiest wars ever fought. While the film focuses on Vera, it reveals the war experiences of the three young men in her life – her beloved younger brother Edward and his two friends Victor (Colin Morgan) and Roland (Kit Harrington). While Victor is enamored with Vera and her parents (Emily Watson and Dominic West) would like to see them marry, Vera is determined to remain single – until she meets Roland. When war is declared, it changes everything for all of them.
“Testament of Youth” has an appealing, talented cast and first-rate period sets and costumes. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander is a rising star, a beauty with a gift for accents and the talent to lend depth to her performances. She follows up her excellent performances in the recent “Ex Machina” and “A Royal Affair” with this film. Pairing Vikander with handsome Kit Harington, John Snow from HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” makes for an attractive romantic couple. However, the focus of the film is much more on Vera’s individual experience more than the three men in her life who go off to war. Miranda Richardson also has a nice role as a professor at Oxford who inspires Brittain.
Although the film is about an exceptionally brutal war, the first modern war, the emotional tone of this film is surprisingly cool and the war’s violence is nearly absent. Images of the battlefield are brief and and focus more on the mud than the machine guns, a new technology that made the war so deadly. Even in the hospitals where Vera works, scenes of the wounded are restrained. While avoiding the gruesome is a relief, it seems like a strange choice, as if the director wanted to sanitize this bloodiest of wars and keep it at arm’s length, depending instead on audience’s knowledge of history. While the period look of the film is excellent, the film has a few historical errors, particularly a reference to Spanish flu in 1914 at the war’s start, when the epidemic did not take place until 1918, near the war’s end.
The film’s cool emotional tone and distancing from the battlefield tamps down the dramatic power of Brittain’s story. The film is still good, but not great, and might have more appeal for those already familiar with Brittain’s book. “Testament of Youth” opens Friday, July 10, at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
© Cate Marquis
