Precious is a new-style weepie but one that is much more bracing than depressing
Precious
Theatre
Ian McKellen is captivating throughout. He delights in the play’s gallows humour, yet is also maudlin and poignant
Waiting for Godot
Theatre
Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high
Enron
Utterly, utterly brilliant. You really are in for a treat
Though 'Trilogy' has won rave reviews, I personally found myself exasperated after about an hour
We went on a quiet sunday evening and the food was excellent, but the experience let down by the service and ambiance
London,
Nick Curtis's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Lone Scherfig.
Cast: Emma Thompson, Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina
Love lessons: Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in An Education
Romantic: Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper
Young actress Carey Mulligan is the real revelation in this slim, nicely crafted exploration of the social strictures of Sixties London, extracted from journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir.
Mulligan plays Jenny, a clever and sprightly teenage girl who is forced to decide between intellectual independence via a place at Oxford, and marriage to her much older suitor David (Peter Sarsgaard).
Mulligan’s dimpled, sparkly charm and a mercurial skill that enables her to seem both childlike and sophisticated beyond her years, carry a film that might otherwise leave one diverted but thinking “so what?”. For this is as much about a particular, and not particularly appetising, set of personalities as it is about the still-stiff, pre-swinging London where girls were supposed to become housewives.
Jenny, like Barber, is uniquely sure of herself. Jenny’s parents, in Nick Hornby’s screenplay, are just as stupid and petit-bourgeois as Barber described hers in her book.
David is a blandly plausible seducer, a Jewish property developer with a taste for the high life and shady business dealings: you feel that Jenny offers herself and her virginity to him in a concerted bid to dash the dust of genteel, gentile Twickenham off her shiny schoolgirl shoes.
Although it’s helmed by a Dane, Lone Scherfig, this is a quintessentially British period piece, so naturally the production design looks great.
Jenny is whisked from the drab suburbs to a world of frogeye Sprite sports cars, champagne schooners, jazz clubs and French cigarettes.
But the pivotal revelation that David’s duplicity extends beyond business isn’t that surprising or even — given the age difference — shocking.
There’s nice support from Dominic Cooper as another tempter and Rosamund Pike (gamely playing a dim trophy girlfriend from whom the lustre is starting to fade). But really, this is Mulligan’s show. Hers is an assured, engaging performance to cherish, and it lifts Scherfig’s film to above the humdrum.
An Education has its premiere tonight as part of the London Film Festival in the Vue West End. Further film festival performances tomorrow and Thursday and the film goes on general release from 30 October.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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