Arts & Events

Opens June 19 at the Landmark Shattuck

Based on the best-selling 1933 autobiography of the real-life Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth tells the story of a remarkable young woman who broke barriers at Oxford, lost her brother, his closest friend and her own lover in the bloodbath of WWI, wound up working as a nurse in the battlefields of France and survived the war to become one of her country's most outspoken pacifists.

 

Despite the promotional fist-bumps touting the presence of Game of Thrones survivor Kit Harrington, director James Kent's film, Testament of Youth, belongs — heart, head and soul — to Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain, a young-woman-of-privilege whose life is rent asunder by WWI. 

The performances are all first rate. Despite her youth, Swedish-born dancer/actress Vikander scored a major role in the 2012 production of Anna Karenina before going on to land leads in The Seventh Son and Ex Machina (where she starred as a robot with a see-through head and body who proved her intelligence qualified as "human" by outwitting—and killing—her creator). 

The sets are as extravagantly lovely as the British coastline and midlands allow and the costumes are sumptuous and serviceable. But, alas, the beauty of youth and the blooming of love are doomed, foreshadowed by the rumors of encroaching war ("Don't worry. They say it will all be over in a few weeks") and a brooding soundtrack that belies the optimism. 

Max Richter's frail and longing score initially caresses the film with a gentle longing but eventually succumbs to the brooding pulse of approaching conflict. As the war nears, the film's orchestral shape darkens. Melody fails and the soundtrack falls into a single tone of surging, unrelenting urgency—with the power of a storm-swollen river that is slowly eating away at the ground on which the young friends and newly awakened lovers stand. 

As Vera's sweetheart, Roland, Harrington delivers some powerful moments as a soldier on leave. He has been painfully undone by what he has seen and done. Despite Vera's concern, he remains in a dark place, distant and unreachable. 

After the outbreak of war, the real Vera Brittan put aside her dreams of obtaining a degree from Oxford and set out to become a nurse on the European battlefront. To her surprise, the men she winds up comforting are not exactly the soldiers she expected to be ministering to. 

There is a moment, amidst the turmoil of the battlefield, where Vera hears the cry of a wounded soldier and recognizes the voice of her brother who she had last seen boarding a troop train to the front. One suspects this improbable event is not to be found in Brittain's book but it still makes for good cinema. 

Notwithstanding the film's many virtues, I was left with a feeling of disappointment. 

How often have we seen films like this? Films populated by beautiful young people whose as-yet-unrealized hopes and dreams are shattered by the tragedies of war? 

And, despite the quality and emotional power of these "war romances," bloody conflicts continue to befall humanity. Consequently, each new ""Rom-War" perpetuates the message that wars will recur with the inevitable regularity of storms and floods and earthquakes. War are just "another one of those beastly things we have to muddle through." 

That's the problem with Testament and many similar films: they appear to oppose war but they accept it as a given, a pretext for unspooling tales of lives uprooted and love lost. The more of these films that reach the screen, the more war—for all its hideous trappings—becomes little more than a convenientvehicle that drives the drama. War is cinematically sanitized: It's the horse a succession of heroes ride into perdition. 

However, there is one brilliant moment, towards the end, when Testament of Youth rises above this formulaic curse. It comes when Vera, newly returned from the trauma of the battlefield, climbs onto a stage at a patriotic rally and shocks the crowd by questioning the war. 

In a moment we've seen before in other films, Vera's words manage to turn an angry, shouting crowd into a suddenly stunned and wordless throng, apparently undone by the power of a young woman's voice. 

But, in Vikander's voice and presence, those words pack the power of a bursting shell. She's fed up with war and she screams at the crowd: "We send our men to war because we think it's the right thing, the 'honorable' thing to do. NO MORE OF IT!" 

For me, this was the single most powerful (and only unexpected) moment in the film. 

I left the theater hoping that there will be a sequel. In 1979, the BBC turned Brittain's prodigious 661-page autobiography into a three-part TV series. 

If there were to be a sequel to Testament of Youth, it would cover Vera Brittain's emergence as a leading voice against war. And that could produce a truly remarkable film. 

For far too long we have been fed a diet of films about people left dead and damaged by the "tragedy of war." It's about time someone made a film about an uncompromising post-war pacifist. And Alicia Vikander, as Vera Brittain, would be the perfect artist to do it.