AN EDUCATION
This beautifully compelling, girl’s coming of age film is based on a memoir by the award-winning British journalist, Lynn Barber. Exquisitely shot and acted, it’s a very authentic taste of the perils and pitfalls that only some of us sidestep on the road becoming grown up.
It’s 1961 London, not yet swinging, still more angry young men and postwar cautiousness. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a bright, smart 16 year old whose father Jack (Alfred Molina), a mid-level civil servant, has higher aspirations for his only daughter. Jenny is thus attending a tightly regulated girl’s school, studying cello and struggling with Latin. When we first meet her she doesn’t appear to be rebellious save for a hint of existential sauciness. In her room, we see her idea of sophistication played out and it’s French: smoking and singing along to Juliette Greco albums.
But this is a sort of cautionary, be careful what you wish for tale. Standing in the rain one day, on the way a lackluster performance, Jenny and her cello are charmed into the sporty little car of the 30ish David (Peter Sarsgaard). We cringe, we worry, but the next thing you know he’s invited Jenny to a Ravel concert and introduced her to his friends who buy Burne-Jones masterpieces at Sotheby’s auctions. David even manages to charm her straight-laced parents into letting him take Jenny to Oxford for the weekend with the promise of an introduction to C.S. Lewis.
It’s a beautiful film that somehow manages to present a disturbing relationship in an understandable but non-exploitative way, always from the point of view of the prey, here Jenny. There is no apology for David, nor is their an attempt to romanticize the situation, he’s seductive but he’s also a creep. While the film does not criminalizes sex with underage girls, it certainly doesn’t endorse it in the way in which most commercial fare peddles teenage flesh. It walks a fine line, recognizing the all to common occurrence of these encounters, as well as the real, often very damaging consequences.
Carey Mulligan, although 22 when she made the film, is outstanding at playing the 16 year old naif as well as the tranformed faux sophisticate. Peter Saargard with his soft face, often plays the sweet looking boy who turns out to be a trouble, sometimes psychotic killer. Here he’s not a boy, he’s clearly an adult male who is torn between worldly and oddly immature. In any case, he cannot be forgiven for his transgressions, except as we watch him spin his web we keep hoping that...well...maybe it’ll turn out that he’s actually only 18. Another key element of this “education” for Lynn Barber was the couple who David introduced her to: his friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike). She wasn’t only charmed by David but seduced by a world, a way of being grown up, going to nightclubs, drinking, concerts, the track, beautiful clothes.
The film is atmospherically period: taking us back to a time when we imagine that girls were more innocent. And perhaps thats true: youth culture hadn’t entirely taken over, they weren’t sexualized in advertising and media the way they are today. What remains the same, unfortunately, is older men’s obessions and the way that it plays into that teenage desire to taste the adult world. As someone with a young daughter, who remembers taking advantage of the fact that I looked much older than I was, I am dumbstruck and frightened by this film. It certainly says something interesting about parent aspirations and responsibility to pay attention even if we’ve got the good, smart and hardworking girls. It was indeed an education.
An Education opens October 9, 2009.
Directed by Lone Scherfig; produced by Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey; written by Nick Hornby, based on a memoir by Lynn Barber; Director of Photography, John de Borman; edited by Barney Pilling, music by Paul Englishby. Released by Sony Pictures Classics.
With: Carey Mulligan (Jenny); Peter Sarsgaard (David); Dominic Cooper (Danny); Rosamund Pike (Helen); Olivia Williams (Miss Stubbs); Alfred Molina (Jack); Marjorie (Cara Seymour) and Emma Thompson (Headmistress.)
