While we wait for Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman to power up for big-screen outings, a different kind of heroine is making her way into our cinemas. She may not have a gold lasso or Kree powers, but Testament Of Youth's real-life heroine, Vera Brittain (Alicia Vikander), had guts, determination and a single-mindedness to make the best of her gifts as a writer. If you could fly, too, she’d be a cinch for the Avengers.
The film’s new trailer provides a deeper context to her arc: the preconceptions of what a woman should and shouldn’t do in Edwardian society are the battleground she must negotiate before war comes and brings the real thing. Click on the YouTube link below for a look.
Playing the young poet, diarist and nurse is Vikander, while Kit Harington plays her fiancé Roland Leighton. As the Great War rumbles over the horizon, she must confront the ever-increasing uncertainty of her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest. They all don the King’s khaki and march off to war. She does likewise in the uniform of a front-line nurse. A star on the rise, Vikander also has Ex_Machina, Derek Cianfrance’s **The Light Between Oceans, Guy Ritchie’s **The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the Tom Stoppard-penned **Tulip Fever on the horizon. This one has former documentarian James Kent behind the camera, promising to marry a documentary aesthetic with the more impressionistic style of Jane Campion and others.
“There’s a poetic underworld that Jane Campion uses, nature and metaphor, and I love that,” Kent tells Empire, “and I think documentaries like Restrepo and Armadillo [are also references], because I’m a big documentary watcher. The marriage between poetry and raw material is what I was looking for.”
With Taron Egerton, Emily Watson, Hayley Atwell, Dominic West and Miranda Richardson in support, Testament Of Youth will be making its UK bow from January 16, 2015. Pick up the January issue of **Empire **– onsale on November 27 – for a full on-set report.