An Education (12A)

Alison Rowat's Review

Don’t try this in real life. The opening scene in Lone Scherfig’s beautifully assembled coming of age drama, based on the memoir by the journalist Lynn Barber, ought to carry one of those warnings issued by children’s TV presenters whenever scissors appear. Young Miss Barber, you see, once did something very dangerous indeed.

It’s a rainy day in Twickenham. The Sixties have not yet begun to swing. Sixteen-year-old Lynn, or Jenny as she is here, is waiting at a bus stop when a car pulls up and a stranger, an older man, offers her a lift. She gets in, and so begins a relationship that sends her life into a tailspin.

Like much else in Scherfig’s picture, which has a screenplay by Nick Hornby, the incident is handled in the best possible taste. What comes to mind when watching it is not the appalling risk Jenny was running, but The Smiths’ song, This Charming Man: “Why pamper life’s complexity when the leather runs smooth on the passenger seat?” Or to misquote Hartley, the past is a foreign country: they viewed dodgy behaviour differently there.

Which is not to say An Education glosses over everything it touches. Like all good stories, there are layers upon layers to this tale, and Hornby’s skilful screenplay exposes each.

An Education is as much a cringe-inducing dissection of class as it is a portrait of a teenage girl, equally a hymn to education and the doors it can kick open as it is a warning about smooth talkers of no visible means.

Above all, it’s a tremendous calling card for Carey Mulligan, who plays Jenny. Late of Northanger Abbey, Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice, Mulligan is on outstanding, star-making form in this modern day costume drama. Playing opposite is Peter Sarsgaard as David, the charmer who takes Jenny to concerts and night-clubs in the company of his friend Danny (Dominic Cooper) and his glam girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike doing a smart job of playing dumb).

Keeping the home fires burning for Jenny, and reminding her constantly of the need to land a place at Oxford, are her newly middle class parents (Alfred Molina back to his loud, overbearing best and Cara Seymour).

There’s a third influence at work in the form of Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), Jenny’s concerned teacher.

Caught between the devilish good time she can have with Peter and slogging her way across the deep blue sea that lies between school and university, Jenny is a girl overboard.

She adores Peter’s sophisticated lifestyle, and his fearlessness. Peter jokes about going to the university of life (“I didn’t get a very good degree though”), he never worries about spending money (unlike her parents), and he runs at life expecting every obstacle to fall before him.

Jenny’s parents, though initially sceptical, are won round. Peter ought to be their suburban nightmare come true, but instead he’s seen as a good catch. Just as they start to fall in love with him, Jenny begins to see his flaws. When she learns where his money comes from her instinct is to walk away, but it’s so exciting, so delightful, in this web she’s caught in.

Sixties London has to be one of the more frequently captured times and places in cinema, but Danish director Scherfig (Just Like Home, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself) gives the place a fresh lick of glamour, stopping to peer into its murkier corners. Here is a city of night-clubs and auction houses, of fabulous pads where beautiful young things sip cocktails. It’s also a place where slum landlords exploit the poor and the newly arrived. Britain is starting to boom, but not for everyone.

Scherfig does an equally sensitive job handling the growing intimacy between Peter and Jenny. While not quite ending scenes at the bedroom door, she wisely has her couple keep most of their clothes on. Anything else would have destroyed the carefully cultivated sense that Jenny is in control of what’s happening in her life – or thinks she is. Without that, the film would have strayed into very discomfiting territory.

As the good times with Peter roll on, Jenny wakes up to dreary adult concerns about choices and consequences. Plenty of advice is coming her way – Emma Thompson does a deliciously chilling headmistress, holding out the prospect of a career in the civil service – but will she listen?

While her internal debate rumbles on, the last third of the film sags. It’s not easy to go from scenes of strolling by the Seine to anxious conversations in suburban kitchens without losing pace, but Scherfig eventually rallies.

There are no fireworks, true, but then this is a film that prefers small displays of emotion to grand gestures.

It’s a very British piece, full of buttoned up people yearning to breathe free, and as such is a deft portrait of the times, and one clever girl in particular.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Set in 1961, An Education represents the first time novelist Nick Hornby has adapted someone else's work for the screen.

Sixteen year old Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is the brightest girl in her school, full of ideas about the kind of life she’s going to lead, but her fusty father (Alfred Molina) is adamant that she’ll be going to Oxford to further her education.

When she meets the much older David (Peter Sarsgaard), she’s charmed by his bohemian lifestyle, as he takes her to clubs and concerts with his friends (Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), and on to Paris.

Hornby brings the same warmth and humour that informs most of his work, and though it seems familiar in places, An Education is written without cliché and directed with grace by the Danish Scherfig, who previously made Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself in Glasgow.

The film works best as a portrait of a feisty and determined young woman. Jenny’s teacher (Olivia Williams) questions whether she’s learning more about life through culture and experience than by going to university, and it’s clear things are not going to go on forever with David.

Sarsgaard, slightly ropey accent notwithstanding, just about manages to not come across as a dirty old man, even if there’s little doubt that David is probably a bit dodgy.

So how Jenny is going to grow from the experience is her real education, as she comes to realise that it’s the people who care about her who are the most important.

In the supporting roles, Molina is especially good, revealing hidden depths to a character who could have been comically one-dimensional. There’s a nice cameo from Emma Thompson as Jenny’s headmistress, and a hilarious turn from Rosamund Pike as one of the dizziest blondes to grace our screens since Jean Hagen in Singin’ In the Rain.

But it’s really a showcase for the outstanding Mulligan. She’s fantastic, no doubt about it, delivering a performance of vigour and substance, but just because she wears a little black dress in one scene, it’s perhaps a little early to be hailing her as the reincarnation of Audrey Hepburn as some observers would have it.

Sweet, funny and engaging, An Education is British drama at its best. And, in Carey Mulligan, a star is born.