A Great War-era character piece celebrating one of the nation’s great unsung heroes, ** Testament Of Youth** only starting shooting a few months ago. Surely, you’re saying, it can have a trailer already? Well, it can. And it does. And, through the magic of the internet, here it is.
The 100th anniversary of that terrible conflict seems an apt time to (re)introduce Vera Brittain, played by Alicia Vikander, a pioneering journalist and, before that, a nurse tending to the wounded of the trenches in Étaples. Brittain was a ground-breaker in many ways. She defied the chauvinism of the times to head to Oxford and later pursue a career in journalism that was considered the exclusive domain of men. She also wrote the book from which the film takes its title, a great solace for those who lost loved ones in the war.
Far from escaping the impact of conflict, Brittain lost her brother and her fiancé Roland Leighton (Kit Harington). Vikander, who’s impressed in just about everything she’s done in her career to date, looks to be doing a fine job capturing the chronicler of the so-called “lost generation”, intelligence, free-spiritedness, grief and all.
With Taron Egerton, Dominic West, Emily Watson, Hayley Atwell, Miranda Richardson and Anna Chancellor also on board, Testament Of Youth arrives in the UK in early 2015.