THREE weeks ago, James Kent’s film, based on Vera Brittain’s memoirs of 1914 to 1918 when she postponed her ambition to go to Oxford and instead became an army nurse, had a brief season at the British Film Institute’s London Film Festival.
Here in Canberra on November 6, to commemorate the War to End All Wars that began a century ago, “Testament of Youth” opened a festival of British films at Palace Electric. This is apposite synchronicity to which the film delivers little accompanying serendipity.
Hopefully, the film will get commercial release in Australia. It takes a constrained perspective of the war in which Vera (Alicia Vikander) lost her fiancé and several young men who were her childhood friends during an idyllic childhood. It visits battlefields only briefly to portray their terrible effects on the young men about to rise from the trenches and charge into enemy fire. It lingers in a matter-of-fact style in the mud and blood surrounding the field hospitals where Vera learned her nursing craft and asepsis was a condition devoutly to be wished for but virtually impossible to attain.
The film sent the audience out in a misty-eyed silence palpably reflecting its statement. Admirably depicting the bleakness of the physical and emotional environments in which young women toiled and all too often watched their efforts come to naught, it’s not easily forgotten, for the best of reasons.
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