Testament of Youth : Film Review

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In "Testament of Youth", Vera Brittain chronicled her struggle to become a student at Oxford in 1914, when women were only begrudgingly allowed to monitor courses, but the university did not confer degrees on them.



War came, and Brittain's fiancé, her brother, and many of their friends, volunteered for service, which took them to the slaughter-house of France. Brittain abandoned her Oxford studies, became a nurse, and followed them to France, where nursing both British and German soldiers reinforce her passionate belief in the futility of war.

In 1933, "Testament of Youth" is about her life, and the losses of her generation, which became a best- seller in Britain and the USA.

Yet when Vera Brittain died in 1970, her daughter Shirley Williams tells us that: "she believed that as a writer she had been forgotten, the fading voice of a dying generation."

In 1979, the BBC adapted the novel into a five-part television series, which once again made the book, and its sequel, "Testament of Experience", into bestsellers, and helped us to see the agony and loss of war through a woman's eyes.

And now yet again, a hundred years after many of the events that Vera Brittain chronicled, the BBC has made a film of the book, now recognised as one of the defining accounts of her age.

And that may have been a problem with the film – where the characters are almost too perfect, and the tragedy all too predictable.



That said, Alicia Vikander is a superb choice for Vera Brittain, and convincingly manages the transitions from cloistered Edwardian young woman, to scholar, to nurse, to activist, and convincingly shows how she had to try to blot out her horror in order to be of some help in the hospital. She also beautifully portrays the growth of her affection within the constraints of her time, and the pain of the losses of lover and brother are palpable.

Without showing a shot being fired, because, largely, we see through Vera Brittain's eyes, we experience the horrors of war.

It may say something about whether or not humanity has learned a great deal that the amputees in the film were all casualties from Afghanistan.

This is a memorable film of a great book. Not quite, I think, a great film, but one well worth seeing.



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