Testament of Youth: Review

Sometimes I have no idea why I put myself through these emotions.

Every time I watch a film set during WW1 or WW2 a part of me thinks "maybe this one will have a happy ending" or at least "this one won't turn me into an ugly crying mess on the floor of my bedroom at 2 in the morning"

But the reality is, war is sad. Men died young and those who didn't die came back changed. It's impossible and downright immoral to show a war film that doesn't reflect that because that's the reality of it. That being said I still didn't expect this film to be as devastating as it was, partly due to the fact that Vera Britton's story is a true one taken from her memoirs and all the characters in the film were real people who, thanks to her writing, are now remembered.

This isn't the first time the BBC have adapted Vera's words for the screen. There was a five part television series in 1979 which I have not watched but am intrigued by. It always fascinates me how the same text is translated differently depending on the time and this text is particularly interesting regarding Vera's brother Edward but we will get to that later.

1. Narrative

Testament of Youth isn't really a story about war but more about the people left behind. Vera Britton was a bright young woman who studied vigorously in the hope of getting an Oxford education. She lived at home with her parents, younger brother Edward and a lodger called Rowland with whom a romance begins to blossom. However just as they are discovering their feelings for one another, war breaks out and both Rowland and Edward are eager to sign up. While Vera doesn't want either to go she fights her father to help Edward go since he fought for her to get her education, the two of them are very close and their relationship is portrayed beautifully in the film.

After hearing that Rowland is being sent to France (Edward was posted on English soil for the first year of the war) Vera decides that she can't stand back behind books any longer and gives up her place at Oxford to become a war nurse, the film documents her harrowing time on duty as she prays that none of the men she tends will be the love of her life or her brother.

Everything we see in the film is following Vera. Apart from one scene where a letter is read there are very few shots of the trenches or of the actual war, only a recurring montage of men looking straight down the camera, including the two men that Vera holds most dear. This claustrophobic stress of not knowing who is going to survive is incredibly effective. In the first act of the film we come to love these characters, as the film continues we see them only sparsely and when we do see them they're not the same characters we saw at the beginning, until, we don't see them at all.

Throughout the film this feeling is likened to drowning. Water is a common motif throughout the film. In the opening scene Vera is staring at a painting of drowning sinners in a church. Later on we see Vera, her brother and his best friend playing by a lake, water symbolising home and peace. The first time Rowland returns he is looking out at a tumultuous sea, his tone blunt and dangerous, hardly paying any attention to Vera until she eventually manages to get through to him. Then at the end after losing everyone she holds most dear and living through a period of extreme grief, Vera returns to the lake they played at as kids and swims calmly on the surface, the perfect metaphor for the stiff upper-lip attitudes people show on the surface when their bodys are working so hard just to keep them afloat.

2. Adaptation

Adaptations like this are always tricky because the BBC has a reputation for dramatising to the maximum which can at times feel staged and sometimes manipulative. The violins start playing and there may as well be a producer shouting "CRY GODDAMMIT" out of the screen. I've noticed this happen in a few dramas where they've tried to condition the audience into feeling certain emotions instead of just letting the story and performances do their jobs.

There are unfortunately times when Testament of Youth falls into this trap but in many ways it's justifiable here. This is Vera's story and while her period of grief does seem at times like probing the audience for a tear it doesn't feel un-genuine either. It feels confused and frustrated and those flashback images of the boys walking along a road wearing light clothing might be cliche but when you think about it Vera wasn't in the trenches, she doesn't really have any other reference for how they died appart for them walking away from her.

There is also a problem with adaptations in regard to what the text says vs the historical events, as I mentioned earlier there is a very interesting balancing act to be done here in regard to Vera's brother 18 year old Edward Brittain.

Historically speaking Edward Brittain was a gay man. There are illusions to this in Vera's memoirs where she states he had "trouble with women" but the version of his death that she wrote and the reality of it contradict. According to friends and men that fought besides him Edward had relationships with men during his time in service. One of these men he wrote a love letter to while serving time in Italy. Official censors read this letter and initiated an investigation. Edward was due to be court martialed after his active duty and was not to be told.

Edward's commanding officer was not meant to say anything but apparently took him to one side and hinted at what was happening, telling him that all letters were opened and read before being delivered. 24 hours later Edward was found dead with a bullet wound to the head. The only officer to die during the 1918 attack against Austrian forces. It is unclear as to whether he killed himself or deliberately put himself in the line of fire.

In Vera's account, Edward was killed by a sniper in Italy because that is the story she had been told when she wrote the book. It was only later in 1933 when a Colonel Hudson who had fought alongside Brittain told her about Edward's final days. She never addressed this publicly but her second book in 1936 called Honorable Estate is a story about a gay officer who deliberately chooses death rather than revealing his sexuality.

So when a filmmaker approaches Testament of Youth, how do you approach the character of Edward? How he was written or how he was?

This version decides to adapt only Vera's experiences to the extent that the audience is never told how Edward dies. We get a telegram and we see her grief. We as the audience know nothing else and we don't have to. There is a scene in which, injured and in Vera's care Edward read's a letter from a fellow soldier he's kept in his pocket but without contextual knowledge of Edward Brittain it's unlikely audiences will have picked up on the subtext.

While to an extent it frustrates me as there are very few stories that chronicle the events of LGBT people during the war, I can't fault this film for showing only what Vera herself would see and I definitely can't fault it for treating Edward Brittain as a tragic casualty of war regardless of how he died. His sexual orientation should not change how we view this man, how he lived or how he died. It doesn't matter and I respect that choice on the writer and director's half. This is Vera's film, not Edwards.

3. Cinematography and production

Unfortunately this is where Testament of Youth begins to feel a bit too ordinary. It's a costume drama. The mise-en-scene, the lighting set-ups and blocking scream costume drama. While many like this aesthetic it doesn't really do a lot for me. For me the cinematography could have done more for the story. Been a bit more experimental and really delve into Vera's mind. Instead what we get most of the time is flat and visually a bit dull.

The only time this changes for me is during the time Vera is working as a nurse for injured Germans. In this section of the film you really feel the dirt, the unsanitary conditions and a truly heartbreaking wide shot of miles of bodies on stretchers with nurses going between them.

This scene is the only scene I remember for its cinematography. It's massively impactful as we slowly zoom backwards to see the full extent of the wounded. I wish that the rest of the film had taken notes from this moment. There are no other moments in the film where the cinematography feels as motivated as this.

4. Conclusion

At the beginning of this review I said I didn't know why I put myself through these emotions. Why do we still make and watch war films when they only ever upset us? In a strange way I think it's one of our most powerful ways of remembering. In film we are transported into what they experienced. What they heard, what they saw and how they felt. There is no other art-form that gives us that intensive immersion if their job is done right.

On the other hand film can also be a very manipulative tool of forgetting. We must remember that whatever we see on screen isn't what they saw, what they heard and what they felt because we can never experience that truly. Film isn't history it's an expression of history like poetry and painting.

Testament of Youth is hard to place because it seems to be between those two ideals. On the one hand it follows the memoirs of Vera Brittain very closely, on the other hand it's also highly dramatised and Vera didn't know the whole story, how could she have? Unfortunately I doubt this film will be remembered as an emotional adaptation of a real woman's journey, I think it'll mostly be remembered as "that war film from 2014 that John Snow, Merlin and Eggsy were in" which is a shame. There just isn't enough that's different about it, it doesn't ring true especially not without the audience having some prior knowledge of the Brittons and Vera herself.

Overall I give Testament of Youth a 7/10 and I encourage people to watch it. There are very few women's stories told about this time on film and Vera's is definitely a story which deserves to be told.