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An Education

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Lone Scherfig. Cast: Emma Thompson, Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina

 

Country: UK. 2009. 100mins

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Sex and the sixties in An Education

 

Groovy baby: Carey Mulligan (with Dominic Cooper) is delightful as an impressionable teenager caught in the social whirl of the early Sixties

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• Carey Mulligan is a class act in An Education

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I once asked an older friend of mine what it was like in the Fifties. “It was like living in the dark,” she said, “and in the Sixties it was as if somebody had turned the lights on.” By the Sixties, I took her to mean what Larkin had meant: the period after 1963, when sex began, “Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”. For those interested in borderlands or purgatory or in-between-ness, 1959-63 might be that era’s most fascinating time, when Britain was steeped in grey.

The moment comes to light in director Lone Scherfig’s and Nick Hornby’s adaptation of Lynn Barber’s excellent memoir of her first boyfriend, An Education. It’s not really a memoir of the boyfriend so much as the girl and the parents who took to him, a book about how we lived then. A lovely depiction of all that, the film will please everyone who ever wondered who they used to be. The skill of it is in allowing you to see not only how a girl’s sense of herself might be hanging in the balance, but to feel how the values of an era can be drama personified.

Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a Twickenham schoolgirl in 1961 with some of the props you need to be a cool customer: she’s smart, she’s pretty, and her hair’s a bit like Juliette Greco’s. She dreams of Oxford and she probably knows a thing or two about Albert Camus.

There’s more than a hint of British suburban hunger about her: Jenny wants to be someone she’s not sure she’ll ever be allowed to be, but we see, by some twinkle in her eye, that her character is equal to some big changes.

As she is coming home one day in the rain, a 30-ish man stops his car and offers her a lift. He is David (Peter Sarsgaard), a smiling, quite plausible and interesting guy, who soon charms her and her parents into thinking he’s good news.

Jenny’s parents, beautifully played by Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour, are the kind of fussy, lovable hypocrites that made England great. They only want the best for Jenny but they are willing to accept David not as a threat to their daughter’s innocence but as a gift-horse with plenty of stories and an affable manner. As befuddled practitioners of misplaced loyalty, they are perfectly judged both in the writing and in the performances. As you watch them you feel sorry for the Ovaltine-stained redundancy of their lives, and you start worrying for Jenny. Can she survive all this?

Well, she knows how to have a good time. And you imagine — or the film causes you to imagine — that knowing how to have a good time is becoming The Knowledge. David takes his young girlfriend to clubs and suppers, to auctions, and she meets his business partner Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Danny’s airhead girlfriend Helen (Rosamund Pike).

The parties give off a whiff of too much perfume, too much champagne, too many secrets, and the possibility of scandal. It’s the sort of world Mandy Rice-Davies graduated from, but to Jenny it’s all just a whirl, and she gets an inkling of the dodgy way David makes his money.

Scherfig was a brilliant choice as director: she knows how to make a character precise, even when a character such as David lives precisely in the shadows. The film is patient and it doesn’t rush at you with revelations, as some Hollywood bull would: you just slowly discover that Jenny, for all her trips to Paris and the ciggies and the giggling tales laid out for her friends at school, may be facing something that could mark the end of her youth. Carey Mulligan is one to watch: she can enfold delight and doubt into a single smile, and her performance is one of the best by an actress this year.

The two men in her life, David and her dad, essentially vie with each other to manhandle her spirit. She certainly has plenty of it to go around — the scenes where she is confronted by an anti-Semitic and half-demented headmistress, played by Emma Thompson, are alone worth the price of entry. But always to the fore is Jenny’s vulnerability; you find you care for her as you watch her go ill-protected into this arena of male needs. And part of the film’s measured charm is to step back from making a giant hullabaloo out of the events surrounding Jenny.

This is true to Lynn Barber’s achievement in the original piece of writing: things can be important in your life, they can be life-changing, without requiring a 16-gun salute and a five-act opera to underscore them. This isn’t a dark movie with world-historical events ripping up the screen. It is something much better than that — a sensitive and sometimes quiet movie with a perfectly rendered shock at its centre.

Jenny reminded me of several of the girls taught by Miss Jean Brodie. The girls in that novel (published in 1961) betray their parents and their teachers, but are betrayed in greater measure before their prime. Yet it isn’t blame that keeps them going: just the overwhelming sense that they were part of an amazing story.

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