Testament of Youth: battles of Brittain make for moving biopic

Testament of Youth (2014)
Director: James Kent
Entertainment grade: B
History grade: C-
Vera Brittain’s memoir of her experiences and losses in the first world war was published in 1933 as Testament of Youth. It became an instant bestseller and remains a classic.

Youth

Before the war, Vera’s main obstacles are parents and boredom. She is played brilliantly by the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair). Her parents don’t like the idea of her going to university: they fear that if she becomes a bluestocking she will never find a husband. This is more or less accurate. Brittain was bored out of her mind during her girlhood in the beautiful but snobbish and conservative environs of Buxton. “Even at 18, a mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery,” she wrote, adding that she would have been in danger of “dying of spontaneous combustion” had she not had her diary to write and an interesting curate in a nearby village. The film’s screenplay might be accused of losing a little of Brittain’s wit in its translation from page to screen, but it captures her courage and sharpness well enough.

‘A mentally voracious young woman cannot live entirely upon scenery’ … Testament of Youth. Photograph: Allstar/BBC Films

Romance

Just as Vera is shouting at her father (Dominic West) that she doesn’t want a husband, in walks hunky young Roland Leighton (Kit Harington). “Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron. All these romantics aren’t good for you, you know,” he says, rather patronisingly, as he helps her collect the books she has hurled out of a window in a fit of teenage angst. The meeting seems contrived, and it is – the two really met at dinner, according to Brittain’s memoir, and there was no book-throwing rage or patronising putdown. Both Vera and Roland are due to go to Oxford, until Roland announces – when they meet on the station platform to go up together – that he’s joining the army instead. The film has, understandably, dramatised this moment, which in real life was communicated by letter. “I don’t think in the circumstances I could easily bring myself to endure a secluded life of scholastic vegetation,” the real Roland Leighton wrote. “I feel that I am meant to take an active part in this war.”

‘All these romantics aren’t good for you, you know’ … Kit Harington as Roland Leighton with Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain

More romance

The film’s recreation of Roland and Vera’s courtship is sweetly done, and the scene in which he leaves for the war – with a train full of desperate, heartbroken women saying goodbye to the men they love – is extremely moving. It is fictionalised, though. “We never kissed and never said a word,” wrote the real Brittain of seeing Leighton off for France.

Heartbreak

Vera cannot live a life of scholastic vegetation either, and leaves Oxford to become a nurse. Christmas approaches, and Roland gets leave to come home and marry her. Vera’s parents are with her at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, and she is already wearing a white suit – “Just half an hour to go!” Then a telephone call comes through. She thinks it must be Roland, but it is his sobbing mother (Anna Chancellor), with the news that he is dead. In reality, there was no wedding scheduled – just a small reunion. The call from Roland’s mother came on the morning of 27 December 1915, as Vera was getting up.

War

The film misses out the real Brittain’s period of nursing in Malta, skipping to 1917 when she travelled to France to work in a field hospital. She is put to work nursing German prisoners of war. One day, a huge number of British casualties come in. As she walks out of the hospital hut, the camera pulls back to show rows of stretchered men laid out on the ground. It pulls back and back, showing more and more as Vera picks her way between them. This isn’t in Brittain’s book, though film buffs will recognise the shot from the famous moment when Scarlett O’Hara walks through lines of injured soldiers in Gone With the Wind. Told that her brother, Edward (Taron Egerton), is among the wounded, she searches frantically for him among the bodies. She finds him, and carefully nurses him back to health. This is fictional. The real Edward Brittain was not wounded in France, nor was he nursed by his sister.

Testament of Youth charts the origins of Brittain’s pacifism Photograph: Allstar/BBC Films

Verdict

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.