Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)
As you’re watching it “An Education” appears to be a straightforward film about a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who falls in love with a much older man in 1961. Later though, you begin to realise its surface simplicity is deceptive.
It is, in part, a coming of age movie, based on a memoir by journalist Lynn Barber that first appeared in abbreviated form in the literary magazine “Granta”.
Producer Amanda Posey bought the film rights and asked her then boyfriend Nick Hornby to write the screenplay. It took several years to develop the script and find the backing for the movie, some of which came from the BBC.
Danish director Lone Scherfig has gone to great pains, with the producers, to get the sense of period right. And that sense of period is crucial. Even though the story takes place over a decade after the end of the Second World War, Britain was still not entirely out of that sense of post-war austerity. And these were morally strict times. A girl who had lost her virginity or got pregnant was considered to have ruined her life.
For the movie, the memoir has been structured and polished to give it a stronger narrative shape. The film doesn’t follow life exactly, but what is strong about it is that it refuses to make the characters simple stereotypes. Perhaps it actually makes the older man a little nicer than he was in real life. Or perhaps not. The author did appreciate that she received an education from him, and education in Bergman and fine living and travelling.
In the film version Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is an A-student whose parents are determined she should go to Oxford and do well. They have ambitions for her, but those ambitions are firmly limited by their own sense of reality. They want her to earn a good living, make a good marriage. Academic education for a girl is not something to be valued for its own sake.
Although she is a class leader at school, Jenny does find her suburban existence, and her school life, stultifying. Her dream is to go to Paris, to live a wild arty existentialist life, like singer Juliette Greco. She likes to lapse into conversational French from time to time to show her precocious sophistication.
She is intrigued when David (Peter Sarsgaard) appears in her life. He is a good talker, funny, drives a maroon Bristol, and knows how to win her over. When he first sees her in the rain, he offers to give her cello a lift to keep it dry, and let her walk beside the car, as he knows she shouldn’t appear want to get in a stranger’s vehicle.
David knows that to win Jenny, he has to win over her parents, and he genuinely seems to get on well with them, although they are a little disconcerted by the fact that he is Jewish. He knows how to flatter her demure mother Marjorie (Cara Seymour) and how to persuade her father Jack (Alfred Molina) that they are both men of the world.
In fact, Jack is, although genuinely well-meaning, a limited man who doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in the world. We can see why Jenny, as a teenager, would resent his limitations. We can also see though that he is a good man.
David takes Jenny to a concert of Ravel music and then a night club, and introduces her to his glamorous friends Danny (Dominic Cooper) and his beautiful but far from clever girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike).
They talk about taking a trip to Oxford together, and David persuades Jenny’s parents to agree by saying they will travel an aunt, and that he knows one of her childhood literary idols C.S. Lewis. Here, one of the first shadows enters their relationship, as she sees him and Danny steal a rare map from someone’s house.
She doesn’t like this, and is tempted to break away, but he has introduced her to a new world and to walk away would mean to turn her back on that world. She can’t do it.
Like many a precocious teenager, Jenny does enjoy boasting about her older boyfriend at school. She likes her friends looking up at her, and dispenses Russian cigarettes to them, which they all smoke in as adult a fashion as they can muster.
Although David is, of course, sexually interested in her, Jenny decides that she won’t lose her virginity until her 17th birthday, preferably on a trip to Paris he has arranged. Her English teacher, Miss Stubbs, character is Jenny’s English teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) points out to her that she is pretty and clever, and asks if David appreciates the clever Jenny. Emotionally stung, Jenny blasts what she sees as her teacher’s deadened life. But Jenny, we realise, still has much to learn. And David’s deceptions are more far-ranging than she can, at this point, imagine.
“An Education” could be a movie about an innocent schoolgirl ruined, an older cad, and the stereotyped berating parents. It’s a lot more complex than that. The parents are as in love with David as is Jenny, perhaps even more so. And David does have genuine feelings for her. He at no point forces her into sex, or even tries particularly hard to convince her to sleep with him. She just knows she will at some point. And when she does, she is probably less impressed with it than he is.
The “education” of the titles isn’t just the academic education she gets as she applies for Oxford, and which is threatened by her relationship. It’s also the education she gets from the relationship itself. David tells her at one point that he did not go to Oxford. That he was educated in the university of life. And in awakening her to live music, Bergman movies, France, great food, and moral complexity and duplicity, David provides exactly that education for her.
It’s a strength of “An Education” that we see two sides of almost every character, of almost every event. David persuades sitting tenants to leave their homes by moving a black family in next door. That’s unscrupulous. But then it’s the people’s own racism that encourages them to move out.
Jenny’s father Jack is hardly a culturally enlightened man, but he does have a heartbreaking scene in which instead of reprimanding his daughter, he acknowledges his own part in the events that have brought them to near disaster. Many of the performances here are finely judged. Carey Mulligan has been nominated for several acting awards for her performance as Jenny, and you can see both how naïve and how pretentious she is at the same time. Sarsgaard makes David far more complex than a synopsis might suggest he would be. Molina and Seymour as Jenny’s parents suggest a life beyond what we actually see, with disappointments and trials barely only hinted at.
“An Education” itself has been nominated for several film awards and has been praised by many reviewers. You might not be quite sure as you’re watching it whether it really deserves all this praise. But I do agree with those who feel that there is a lot going on here that you cannot necessarily see at a first glance.
It is ultimately, very forgiving about the foibles of human beings, and perhaps that the main reason why, despite a perhaps too pat ending, it resonates more deeply as you consider it





