Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Alice Vikander, Kit Harington, Dominic West, Emily Watson, Colin Morgan, Hayley Atwell, Taron Egerton, Miranda Richardson, Joanna Scanlan, Niamh Cusack, Anna Chancellor, Jonathan Thurlow, Charlotte Hope, Henry Garrett, Daisy Waterstone, Harry Atwell, Nicholas Le Prevost, Nicholas Farrell.
The Testament of Youth is such that it carries more weight at times than the blinkered, narrow-minded view point of a generation that doesn’t see the damage it has wrought.
Never was this arguably more true than the period of time captured by many, war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, the first hand evidence of a million soldiers in letters home and notably in the writing of Vera Brittain, a woman so determined to try and put the wrongs of jingoistic fervour inflicted by many, including herself, that allowed the senseless slaughter that was the First World War to take the flower of youth across Europe and the world over.
Vera Brittain’s book, The Testament of Youth, has never been out of print and it indeed a testament to the distinguished and prominent advocate of pacifism that the film portraying Vera Brittain’s work is one that both damns the act of war for its merciless folly and indiscriminate waste and highlights the growing necessity as a species to try to understand the other side’s view point before we face the very final solution afforded to us all of complete destruction.
Alicia Vikander captures the spirit of Vera Brittain with as much dogged determination, incredible self belief as one of the foremost feminist thinkers of her day and the presence on screen is remarkable as well at times as chilling, foreboding and illuminating. It is to Ms. Vikander that she carries the film from its initial, seemingly innocent times, in which her brother and her two would be suitors are thrust together in the death of Edwardian virtue as University beckons but is soon torn apart as a single bullet heralds the passing of such carefree times in Britain.
Along with Hayley Atwell in her portrayal of the nurse at the front who condemns with her words the German soldiers by refusing to name them personally, instead giving the wounded and dying men the bitter derogatory moniker of filthy Hun one, two, three and so on, the astounding Miranda Richardson as her tutor at Somerville College Miss Lorimer, Niamh Cusack as the personally brutal hospital sister and the excellent Joanna Scanlan as her aunt/chaperone Belle, this is not just a testament of youth but also a testament of gender politics dictating to a woman who sincerely knows her own mind but sees not just the division that war can bring out in humanity but also the rupturing discord and volatile schism that was placed before women in the initial blossoming days of women quite rightly being given a voice in a society that had neglected them.
Testament of Youth is such that what the cinema goer is offered is a world where war is not glorious, it is not filled with over abundant heroism, but it is perhaps the last vestige and its crippling after effects of insanity witnessed first-hand by a woman who is much to laud for her imagery and truth delivering style as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon in their poetic narratives.
A truly splendid film, one that rips the pathos and humanity from its soul and offers the viewer hope that one lone voice can at least turn the tide of taking down a flowering youth.
Ian D. Hall