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MOVIE REVIEW

Poetry on the Western Front in ‘Testament of Youth’

From left: Kit Harington as Roland Leighton, Taron Egerton as Edward Brittain, and Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain, on whose memoir the film is based.Laurie Sparham/Sony Pictures Classics/Laurie Sparham, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

All history, and most lives, will not fit neatly into a narrative arc. World War I for example. No three-act structure there, just grotesque folly, ceaseless bloodshed, and attrition over the same battered terrain for four years, and then an armistice that laid the groundwork for another round of mass destruction and death.

As for heroes, the machinery of battle and the stupidity of leadership rendered them obsolete and irrelevant. Theodor Adorno famously declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. But after the industrialized barbarism of the
Somme, the same could be said for stories. That might explain why last year’s centennial of the war’s outbreak did not inspire many movies.

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The makers of “Testament of Youth” recognize this futility in their choice of a circular chronology. Based on the memoir of Vera Brittain, the film begins on Armistice Day, with Brittain (Alicia Vikander) stumbling as if dazed through a rapturous crowd celebrating in London. A flashback takes her to 1914, to a world of Edwardian lushness and gentility that seems to have been set-designed by Merchant and Ivory. An independent-minded spirit, Vera wants to go to Oxford and become a writer and enjoy the same privileges as her brother. Her toughness softens when one of the latter’s school pals, the soon-to-be-famed war poet Roland Leighton (Kit Harington), proves to be a kindred spirit.

They fall in love. But as a shot of a discarded newspaper reveals, something terrible has happened in Serbia. . .

It is hard to rate Vikander’s acting abilities from this performance. Her sly automaton in “Ex Machina” had more emotional range. Here she starts out committed but frivolous, as she, like the rest of Europe, sleepwalks into the abyss. So oblivious is she of the inferno to come that she sweet-talks her father into allowing her brother to enlist.

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Later the horror and guilt and monochromatic cinematography benumb her. Rather than continue her classes in literature at Oxford while reading through the daily listings of the dead, she signs up as a nurse, ships off to France, and offers what comfort she can to the endless casualties.

There she eases a dying German soldier’s agony, and so learns the futility of war. But a more eloquent scene passes nearly unheralded. Beside a path in the woods, Roland comes across a desiccated corpse. Violets grow around it. He writes a villanelle and sends it to Vera:

Violets from Plug Street Wood,

Sweet, I send you oversea.

(It is strange they should be blue,

Blue, when his soaked blood was red,

For they grew around his head;

It is strange they should be blue.)

Narrative may have died with this war, but poetry would survive until the next.

Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.