Testament of Youth

I shall begin with a quibble: given the number of excellent young actresses we have in this country – Emily Blunt, Rosamund Pike and Keira Knightley, for instance – why did they pick a Swede, Alicia Vikander, to play Vera Brittain, on whose classic First World War memoir the film is based?

The quibble ends here because actually Vikander – herself only the second choice after the Irish-American Saoirse Ronan – is very good. Nevertheless, this is essentially a British story and it seems odd not to have had a British star.

Okay, but what about the film itself? It was directed by James Kent and written by Juliette Towhidi, looks splendid, is well played and was obviously made with a great deal of care.

Vera – mother of my favourite politician, Shirley Williams – was an extremely bright young woman with a desire to go to Oxford University, though in those days mere women weren’t allowed to take degrees, of course. But her reluctant father (Dominic West) would rather buy her a piano, which she didn’t want, than pay for her to pursue her studies.

Eventually, it’s her brother Edward (Taron Egerton), who persuades Mr Brittain to let her go.

Later, the war having broken out, she returns the favour by persuading Dad to let Edward sign up for active service, something they were both to regret.

And so to the war. As the casualties mount, Vera abandons her studies at Oxford to volunteer as a nurse. In the meantime she has bid tearful farewells to both Edward and her fiancé Roland Leighton (Kit Harington) as they go off to the front line.

If that sort of thing seems like a traditional cliché of war movies it can’t be helped; it actually happened to Vera. Thereafter, with both her menfolk gone, we follow her as she works first in London hospitals and then in a casualty station in France, where she tends to wounded soldiers, both British and German, behind the line.

Of the war itself we see little or nothing. It’s indicated mostly by the contrast between the glorious British countryside where the Brittains live and the filthy mud and rain of France.

Now this is admittedly an inspirational film in which women, hitherto regarded as little more than chattels and potential mothers, stepped up to the plate in a time of dire emergency. Perhaps this was the era when feminism really started.

And there are some touching moments – West weeping helplessly in public and Vera speaking tender, consoling German to a dying soldier.

There’s nothing wrong with the production values or the strong cast, including Emily Watson as Vera’s mum. And Vikander, her English accent pretty well immaculate, makes a very strong impression as Vera. But somehow it all ends on rather a flat note with little sense either of the awful losses suffered by Vera and her family or of the dreadful waste of millions of lives in this ‘war to end all wars’.

Perhaps, with hindsight, the film was made a bit too carefully.