Testament of Youth

I'd seen the brilliant BBC adaptation many years, but this version caught the spirit of the book as well.

Here are my notes:

Testament of Youth

 

UK 2014                      129 minutes

Director:                      James Kent

Starring:                        Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Taron Egerton, Dominic West, Emily Watson and Miranda Richardson

 

“A fine and moving film, if heavy-handed in places. The screen version of Testament of Youth gilds the lily of Vera Brittain’s memoir – though fans of the book may well feel it didn’t need so much extra adornment.”

 

Alex von Tunzelmann

Awards and Nominations

·         Best Actress Nomination for Alicia Vikander at the British Independent Film Awards

·         Best Breakthrough British Filmmaker Nomination for James Kent at the London Critics Circle Film Awards

·         Best British Newcomer Nomination for Taron Egerton at the London Film Festival

After winning a place to read English at Oxford University in 1915 Vera Brittain decides to delay her degree so that she can work as a Voluntary Aid Detachment during the First World War. Her fiancé Roland Leighton, close friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow and her brother Edward have all enlisted, and as the war progresses all are killed. After the war Vera Brittain became a pacifist.

Vera Brittain published Testament of Youth in 1933 having previously tried and failed to write about her wartime experiences in fictional form. The book was well received but it failed to achieve the “classic” status of books about wartime experience such as Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves and Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon.  Even the fiftieth anniversary of WW1 in the 1960s (where the appearance of Oh What A Lovely War together with the arrival of feminism prompted a re-appraisal of the history of the period) failed to bring it to wider audience.  The book only became widely known in in the 1970s when the feminist publishing house Virago Press republished the book and it became their best-selling title, and then in 1979 the BBC produced a superb five part adaptation with Cheryl Campbell as Vera. 

 James Kent began his career as a director by working on EastEnders before moving on to TV movies and bigger budget series.  His most recent work in both the US and UK has included Agatha Christie: Poirot, Margaret (tracing the final days of Margaret Thatcher in power) and several episodes of the historical drama The White Queen.  Testament of Youth is his first film for cinema.