Testament of Youth

Testament of Youth (12A)

UK 2014  130 mins  Dir: James Kent  Starring: Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Taron Egerton, Colin Morgan, Dominic West, Emily Watson, Joanna Scanlan, Hayley Atwell, Miranda Richardson

Championed at various times by feminists and pacifists, Vera Brittain’s affecting WWI memoir has also proved to be a gift that keeps on giving to the BBC. The somewhat ropy-looking 1979 mini-series starring Cheryl Campbell has now been superseded by this lushly photographed, handsomely staged heritage drama from BBC Films, commissioned to cash i.., er, commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of war. It errs rather too much on the side of tasteful restraint, replete with that all-purpose plinky-plonky soundtrack of poignancy. But the casting of outstanding Swedish actress Alicia Vikander as Vera does much to lift the film out of the bracket of cosy middlebrow period drama.

It opens in what might as well be the Jane Austenland of 100 years earlier as young Vera enjoys an innocent, idyllic summertime riverside frolic with her brother Edward (Egerton) and shy chum Victor (Morgan), who has the diffident Edwardian hots for her. There follows a feisty, proto-feminist exchange with strait-laced ma and pa Brittain (Watson and West, wasted in rather one-dimensional roles), during which Vera demands the right to continue her education at Oxford rather than finding an eligible man to marry. Enter, right on cue, hunky poet Roland Leighton (Harington – Jon Snow from Game of Thrones, for it is he). It’s not long before they’re dodging her matronly comedy chaperone (Scanlan) to enjoy a spot of chaste snogging. Meanwhile, there’s a bit of clunky foreshadowing (prominent newspaper headline: ‘Archduke shot – Austria in turmoil’) as Edward undergoes officer cadet training and becomes puffed up with talk of duty and empire.

Ironically, it’s Vera who argues with her father that Edward should be permitted to embark on his jolly adventure sticking it to the dastardly Hun in what is certain to be a “short and fast” war. When this proves not to be the case and the chaps return home on leave completely changed by their experiences, she decides it’s her turn to make a sacrifice and jacks in her hard-won Oxford education to become a nurse on the battlefields of France.

Telly veteran James Kent throws in some fine cinematic flourishes, including a very effective crane shot of a field packed with injured soldiers laid out on stretchers. But there are a good few war movie cliches too. Promising to return to marry your sweetheart as you march off to war is second only to tearfully producing a snap of your loved ones back home as you sit in a soggy, rat-infested trench when it comes to ensuring a swift one-way trip to the military cemetery. A farewell scene on a train is also milked mercilessly. The decision not to include a single battlefield sequence, presumably to privilege Vera’s perspective, also makes it all seem rather jarringly bloodless, distancing us from the carnage of war. But Vikander, in her first major English-language role, is a marvel – nailing the accent effortlessly, never overplaying the emotional scenes that offer the opportunity for grandstanding, and delivering a rounded, human, quietly determined and occasionally wrong-headed Vera rather than the noble cipher she could easily have become. With Son of a Gun and Ex Machina both due for release shortly, we’ll be seeing rather a lot of her on screen soon, but the flawed ‘Testament of Youth’ will have done its job if it sends cinemagoers scurrying for the DVD of her earlier, criminally overlooked A Royal Affair – a textbook example of how to make intelligent, non-chocolate-boxy period drama.