 | Director James Kent, whose background is in television drama and documentary here tells of a British woman’s coming of age during World War I using Vera Brittain’s autobiography as his source material and Juliette Towhidi (writer of Calendar Girls) has written this with drama and a heart. |
Director James Kent, whose background is in television drama and documentary, here tells of a British woman’s coming of age during World War I using Vera Brittain’s autobiography as his source material and Juliette Towhidi (writer of Calendar Girls) has written this with drama and a heart.
Vera Brittain’s WWI memoir of the same name seems ideal subject matter to adapt for the big screen. Wartime and one woman’s inner strength (as well as grace and beauty) is a heady mixture. The casting seems spot on – Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair) is superb in the lead role as the privileged, intelligent and free-spirited Vera wilst the supporting cast of parents Emily Watson and Dominic West, Miranda Richardson, Hayley Atwell and ‘Game of Thrones’ Kit Harirngton are all believable and enjoyable. Vikander has the formidable task of portraying every facet of Vera’s character in a turbulent time, essentially wilful and determined and she does so as a commanding presence.
The film partly centres on Vera battling conservative expectations of how a young lady at the turn of the 20th Century should act, and how her life choices affect those around her. She is a woman who realises that all experiences will challenge her and the transitions from comfortable existence to sheer horror on the battlefront are seamless as we watch her mature from Oxford education signing up as a nurse, firstly on the home front and latterly heading across the channel to war-torn France. The beauty is that this is from a woman's perspective, an often-neglected viewpoint when it comes to the First World War. Women who stood watching husbands, brothers, fathers, friends and lovers go to their deaths and faced the dawn of the post-war years, living with the knowledge of the horrors that had preceded them.
All in all it’s an emotionally exhausting watch as Kent gives us a haunting and poetic tone to the proceedings as an important historical document and as quality entertainment.
Vera Brittain’s WWI memoir of the same name seems ideal subject matter to adapt for the big screen. Wartime and one woman’s inner strength (as well as grace and beauty) is a heady mixture. The casting seems spot on – Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair) is superb in the lead role as the privileged, intelligent and free-spirited Vera wilst the supporting cast of parents Emily Watson and Dominic West, Miranda Richardson, Hayley Atwell and ‘Game of Thrones’ Kit Harirngton are all believable and enjoyable. Vikander has the formidable task of portraying every facet of Vera’s character in a turbulent time, essentially wilful and determined and she does so as a commanding presence.
The film partly centres on Vera battling conservative expectations of how a young lady at the turn of the 20th Century should act, and how her life choices affect those around her. She is a woman who realises that all experiences will challenge her and the transitions from comfortable existence to sheer horror on the battlefront are seamless as we watch her mature from Oxford education signing up as a nurse, firstly on the home front and latterly heading across the channel to war-torn France. The beauty is that this is from a woman's perspective, an often-neglected viewpoint when it comes to the First World War. Women who stood watching husbands, brothers, fathers, friends and lovers go to their deaths and faced the dawn of the post-war years, living with the knowledge of the horrors that had preceded them.
All in all it’s an emotionally exhausting watch as Kent gives us a haunting and poetic tone to the proceedings as an important historical document and as quality entertainment.
