Das letzte Testament

All of the comments i have read about this film focus on it's bleakness, on it's difficultly - due to subject matter, and many of them also quite rightly applaud the performance of Jane Alexander in the Central role. What none of them mention, and what seems so clear to me, is that this is a film that could only have been made by women.

There is no BIG EVENT here. No mass hysteria, violence, rape, disfigurement or any of those other factors that are paraded as horrifying in the majority of Nuclear War films - I am thinking specifically of Threads and The Day After Here.

In Testament we actually see humanity. We see how one family, one community copes with the devastation of just that - their family and their community.

This is what is so tragic, compelling and ultimately horrifying about this film. It is not a panache, it is not a broad canvas. It is about people not about issues and as such the humanity shines through.

I am not saying the other films aren't powerful in their way. They are - and both Threads and The Day After gave me nightmares. But Testament was so far beyond them in terms of simple courage and purpose. There was no grandiose, no glamour or tacked on love story. This was not hollywood, was life or the end of it, and all the more frightening for it.

Testament is one of the main reasons why we should see more women making politic films - and perhaps running a few more countries.

1983..The cold war was in full swing and the fear of nuclear armageddon hung over all our heads. ABC released "The Day After", (which I have already commented on) but in all the furor around that, "Testament" was released. This is THE 1980's nuclear war film. It doesn't deal with the effects on an entire community, but rather on one small, close knit family in California. Jane Alexander's performance was one of legend, and is possibly one of the classic dramatic performances of all time. The day begins innocently enough, dad heads off to work, the kids watch "Sesame Street"..then the Emergency Broadcast System cuts in and the world stops. Ignore all the Y2K mumbo-jumbo and put yourself back in 1983 (most of us know where we were) and watch this film. You may not be "entertained", but you will appreciate what you have just a bit more.

I first saw "Testament" when it came out in 1983. At the time, I was 30 years old and the mother of a two year-old son. As a child of the Cold War years, I have always been interested in films about that most unthinkable event: the detonation of a nuclear bomb or bombs somewhere on our fragile planet. If you are, too, you must watch "Testament" (and another small gem of a slightly earlier era called "Fail-Safe.")

This is a wonderful film that slowly, unbearably reveals what happens in the small, idyllic town of Hamlin after a full-scale nuclear exchange between the superpowers wipes out a large part of America. The town and its citizens, including the Weatherly family, escape initial destruction. But slowly the bonds that hold western societies together (electricity, communication, fresh food, medical help) begin to fray and ravel. There is no television. Batteries to power transistor radios suddenly become more valuable than $20 bills in a town where, suddenly, there's nothing left to buy.

The story and scenes are permeated with a sense of enormous loss. A family loses its husband and father who simply walked out the door, waving a breezy goodbye one morning, and disappeared into the holocaust. All his wife, Carol, and two children have left of him are their memories and some flickering images on home movies, glimpses not just of a lost loved one, but of a lost -- and loved -- world.

A school play about the Pied Piper was in rehearsal before catastrophe hit, and, desperate to recapture some normalcy and to divert the children's attention from a reality to horrible to contemplate, the town decides to go on with the show.In the earlier rehearsal scenes, life was normal, the future shone brightly in the children's faces. Now, as the parents watch the performance, they see no future for these beautiful innocents. To me, this is the key scene of the film: the contrast between what these people once had and what has been lost is staggering. It makes you want to go outside, smell the air, marvel at the full supermarket shelves and the working telephone lines. (This is a gift that the movie gives its audience which goes far beyond entertainment and approaches enlightenment.)

Beyond the wonderful writing, direction and performances, I love the tiny touches in the story. For example, there's the foreshadowing, the implicit warning contained in the presence of a minor character, a little Japanese boy with Down Syndrome who is cared for by the town after his father dies. The child's name is Hiroshi. Pay attention, the script commands us in a whisper: Hiroshima happened once, but it can happen again, and it can happen to you as well as "them."

In the end, the movie is a testament to this undeniable fact, a testament to the stupidity of men who continue building ever-larger, more lethal means of mass destruction, and finally, a testament to the strength of mothers like the character of Carol Weatherly who have no choice but to love and protect their children no matter what comes.

It's been TWENTY YEARS (!) since I've seen this movie in a theatre, and I've never yet forgotten it. If any movie can be said to be life-changing, this is it. TESTAMENT was first shown in theatres, and the film's power became front page headlines for quite some time. People were crying in theatres, and article after article told of how this extremely powerful film affected people. This was not hype; the emotional strength of this movie is genuinely powerful.

For myself, I held back as best I could from crying in the theatre (me being a 23 year old guy seeing it with two (married) friends). But the effect on me was apparently visible immediately: when I walked out of the theatre and passed thru the line of people waiting for the next showing, a woman, who was laughing with her friends, happened to look at me and her face went completely serious. I very nearly hugged her right there, this stranger. When I got home, I cried for about two hours. The film's themes affected my, at the time, concerns about love, relationships, and such like.

One scene I'll never EVER forget, the most devastating: the 13-ish year old daughter asks her mother, "What's it like?" MOTHER: "What's what like?" DAUGHTER: "Making love." The mother (Jane Alexander -- my God, what a performance!) tells her in a very frank and beautiful speech, and the daughter caps off that scene with a devastating remark that just kills you and got my tears flowing (I probably couldn't hold back at that point).

Before making TESTAMENT, director Lynne Littman had made only documentaries, so maybe that "realism" style added to the power and believability of this movie. One of my all time favorite supporting actors is in this film, and he does a fantastic job: Mako. He and the young retarded (Down Syndrome?) boy who plays his son make a phenomenal team. They're my favorite characters: so full of innocence, father so full of love, strength and pain. Agh... my god my god... what a movie. Whew.

I've seen this movie twice, and "Testament" still lingers in my brain as an atom bomb movie. And it's not really about that - the bomb comes and goes fairly quickly - but more about how a community comes together during the aftermath. It's kinda funny how the movie flips from TV commercial suburban life to sobering angst, where precious resources are rationed and then dry up completely.

But it is a powerful movie, thanks largely to the characters and the performances. Even as death loiters nearby and the losses keep piling up (god, this movie just keeps taking), there's Jane Alexander hanging on til the bitter end. Despite the climate of that period in the early '80s, subtlety is really this movie's strong suit. Characters die off, one by one, but it's never staged or theatrical. Very subdued; we'll just get a single image and put the horrifying pieces together.

It's kinda hard to believe there's a (tiny) ray of hope at the end of this thing. But man, it's a punishing journey.

7/10