ALICIA VIKANDER IN TESTAMENT OF YOUTH

Vera Britain's WWI memoir is deeply touching, solemn and well made but a little conventional

She's a little dark to be an English rose, at first, but then when the duty and sorrow and determination come, she's ready to carry them all off with elegance and class. And she's got that long neck, the longest neck of all the volunteer nurses at the front. Swedish-born Alicia Vikander presents the first big proof of her abilities in Testament of Youth. What can you do to hurt this story, which Catherine Shoard of the Guardian called "an absolute sucker punch of emotion" when it was first seen in the UK last year. Poor Vera Britain. (Real person, real author, this a real memoir of a leading 20th-century English pacifist.) She had to lose the three main young men in her life, her fiance, his best friend, and the best friend of both of them, her brother, in the First World War. And we have to watch. That's the sucker punch. And it's done with taste, good acting, and beautiful music. But isn't it a little conventional? Couldn't it have been as well a BBC miniseries? Probably. And this turns out to be only the first volume of Britain's memoir; a miniseries might come yet.

Nothing can detract from the long, brave, harrowing experience of Vera's plucky endurance of those three great losses. And it is a calling card for Vikander making way for what looks like an illustrious career. But one can quote Catherine Shoard's colleague Peter Bradshaw too: "There was an enormous amount of commemorative good taste going on." This is a World War I ceremonial movie event. There's nothing like the sadness and bravery of those World War I young men gone off to war, mired in those horrible muddy trenches, with parts of their bodies blown off, or their minds shattered, but turning out that lovely war poetry, the more touching when it comes from a fallen lover. And there's something infinitely touching now about the chaperone accompanying Vera in her trysts with Roland Leighton (the also excellent Kit Harrington): madly in love, doomed, yet they can hardly get in a kiss! I found those details of the time's social control and morality more interesting than the war segments, though the latter, to be sure, provide a realistically intense image or two, especially the dying men lain out on the muddy ground outside the French field hospital, with Vera pacing among them, desperately seeking her brother Edward (Taron Egerton, another up-and-comer).

Vera Brittain is a remarkable character, well-to-do, mired in anti-feminism, determined to go to Oxford, getting into the women's College, Somerville, past a difficult exam she insists on preparing for all by herself, then moved to throw it away (and numb her sense of loss) to be a war nurse when the man she loves, and her brother, and their friend, and everybody else joins up, then going back to Oxford later and after the war becoming a leading feminist and a pacifist. Seeing such a person emerge through the conventionality of 1914-1918 is fascinating. The cold flame that burns within Vikander fits such a person to a T.

One thing that blunts the story, though, is its essential narrative predictability, the way as soon as Roland and Vera meet we know where their love is going to lead. Her speech, her dedication, and her lonely dip in the lake where they all originally met deliver yes, a nice ceremonial flourish. This is better than Joe Wright's unconvincing Atonement, and Vikander is well away from Wright's frilly, unsatisfactory Anna Karenina. But we need some more horror and rage to get us to the feeling behind that impassioned anti-war speech. I was destroyed, a bit, like Catherine Shoard, astonished by what Vera had to go through. But I wanted more art and originality to make the emotion memorable.

This is James Kent's first theatrical feature as a director after a lot of TV work; if it leaves us still waiting for that extra spark, it still shows he can produce work of quality and intelligence, with a willingness to keep it simple. Max Richter's score is grand or grim at just the right times in restrained ways. Colin Morgan is touching as Victor, the noble friend who longs for Vera but has too much class to accept her pity. What class all these people had! It makes up for some of their limitations -- but the useless slaughter of the war just sits there. As Vera's stern, conventional father who weeps publicly, Dominic West convinces too, and Emily Watson as usual is good in the small role of the mother. It all works. One just would have liked something more.

Testament of Youth, 129 mins., debuted at London October 2014 and entered UK cinemas 16 January 2015. It hit the big screen in the US (limited) 5 June.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.