Testament of Youth (M). Director: James Kent. Starring: Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Dominic West. 130 minutes
Towards the end of Testament to Youth, the new, BBC-funded feature adaptation of Vera Brittain's seminal First World War memoir, we see Vera (Vikander), a young woman grown wise through her wartime experiences, confront a political gathering of hot-headed youths.
They are set on revenge, demanding that only the principle of an eye for an eye may apply to the sins committed against their countrymen by Germany during the war.
Vera, a latecomer to the gathering, interjects. She has worked as a nurse, has had her hands warmed by the blood of the maimed and the soon-to-be-dead of both sides of the conflict. She has lost loved ones, too — a brother, a friend, a fiancé — and the grief of their loss will be with her always.
But how can violent conflict ever be truly redeemed through the trauma of more violent conflict? The German soldiers who died in the war left behind loved ones, too.
It is, it must be said, an uncharacteristically didactic moment in a film that for the most part is elegant and thoughtful, if intermittently trite. But at least it gives due credit to Brittain, who may be remembered as one of the strongest Western voices for pacifism of the 20th Century.
Brittain would go on to pen a second memoir, The Testament of Experience, that further elucidated the ongoing harm caused to Britain and to humanity itself by the horrors of the Great War.
This particular cinematic telling of Testament of Youth is part war film and part coming-of-age drama that, thanks to some strong performances (notably from up-and-coming star Vikander) does justice to this pertinent period of Brittain's moral formation.
It transcends some of its notable shortcomings — its plodding pace, and the lacklustre romantic subplot between Vikander's Brittain and a seriously out-of-his-depth Harrington as her fiancé Roland Leighton.
Vikander brings deep stores of strength and dignity to her portrayal of Brittain. The early portion of the film follows her efforts to gain entry to Oxford, against the wishes of her fond but old-fashioned father (West) and the expectations of her society regrading the role of women.
Later, she abandons her studies so that she can join the war effort as a nurse; a contentious and courageous act, given the social pressures she has resisted by commencing them in the first place.
During the film's most poignant sequence,