Far and away the greatest film ever directed by a woman, but it is in turns so grief-stricken yet so sensitive that it is likely never to find popular acceptance; director Lynne Littman will eventually vanquish into oblivion and nobody will know her name. Which is a shame because in a contemporary moviescape where people are obsessed with giving women directors more chances, people do not want to see what the greatest by a woman could possibly look like because nobody has heard of Littman and so she fails the name familiarity test. A little more than halfway through, a pre-teen daughter asks her mother what making love to her dad was like. And the mother (Jane Alexander) drops her laundry to sit down to tell her what sex is really like and the fulfillment that comes with it. Which is a very appropriate as a loving and generous conversation to impart because it is probable that in a few weeks the daughter will be dead.Testament is a tale of nuclear war aftermath, focusing on a small northern California town removed enough off the map that it takes time for radiation fallout to permeate their region. Annihilation has for a century been the misanthropic cup of tea for male filmmakers – see Bergman (“Shame”), Tarkovsky (“The Sacrifice”), Haneke (“Time of the Wolf”), Von Trier (“Melancholia”) – and what has often been the case are men behind the camera looking foremost to heighten the poison of horror. Littman is too merciful not to see that beneath the horror, the bonds of family and community can strengthen in distress. If this is not a famous film it is because Littman has committed the specious crime of embracing humanity amidst the despair. Many kids, for instance, start looking out for the well-being of their elders and wish to learn such things as piano and ham radio from them while they can.One by one, bodies are wrapped in bed sheets as the local park becomes a landfill for corpses to burn on a pyre. Survivors look for futile purposes to keep going, to keep useful, yes. What’s left? Memories of those times when family members smiled and happily embraced in the cherished past. What is there to do? Well, no one cares about how they personally look at the end; sick or frail, one can be willing to search inside themselves for whatever beautiful words are left to share with one another. The end can be anguished, but it doesn’t have to end with suffocating pessimism. In this crumbled doomsday, the kindness and altruism is what haunts me.Best Film of 1983. Top 100 Films of All Time.
