Director: Lone Scherfig

Screenplay: Nick Hornby

Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

Genre: Drama

CRITIQUE:

The elementary poser of coming-of-age movies is that there’s always formula usually adhered to: innocence risked, lost, never gained yet coming out of the other spectrum of life a tad wiser. Hence, as an audience, you’ll get that funny little feeling you know what’s going to happen at the end of the picture, even in the first ten minutes of the running-time. An Education could have simply been one of those unchallenging films that sticks with the tried-and-tested formula, a latter-day variety of Dead Poets Society with ‘O, Captain, my captain!’ table-mounting sentimentality. Thankfully, then, it’s much more intelligent than that. Yes, the story’s structure has a sense of familiarity and predictability, but An Education is crafted with such grace and elegance and a certain self-awareness that it never bogs down to a tremendous bore.

The tale, based on the memoir of one scathing ‘Demon Barber of Fleet Street’, a Sunday Times columnist Lynn Barber, is not made up of light and feathery rudiments about learning the lessons from the school of life, but instead shaded with some darker elements of betrayal, and even delicate issues of adultery, thieving, paedophilia and sexual politics of the pre-Larkin description of 60’s sexual revolution in Britain. Jenny (played by a breathtaking scope by Carey Mulligan) is a precocious sixteen-year old, who is too old for her years yet too naive for her life experiences, whose Oxford ambition is not so much threatened as seduced by a sophisticated middle-aged man David (a slinky, convincingly slick Peter Sarsgaard), who drives around in trendy American cars and dresses in French mod chic. As it happens, Jenny is a teenager far ahead from her contemporaries, grasps Brontë and Austen effortlessly, appreciates art, listens to Ravel and Juliette Greco and digs jazz rather than the swinging rock-n’-roll de rigueur to the era. Her imaginings of Paris and bourgeois lifestyle are soon to be made real with the help of David.

She also has doting parents (Cara Seymour as the Mum, and a first-rate Alfred Molina as the Dad), who cares too much about Jenny’s future that they’re even willing to swap an Oxford place for a quick ticket to upper-class living courtesy of David. One minute, Latin exam is the topmost priority, but at the whiff of opportunity and class-climbing prospects, they turn into blind-folded hypocrites more than willing to surrender their only daughter. Nevertheless, there are two school teachers who think otherwise: the pragmatic Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams in an almost unrecognisable yet poignant turn), who staunchly stands by Jenny’s Oxford future, and Emma Thompson’s cheerless Headmistress, the embodiment of Britain’s conservatism in the face of a storming change.

In a British director’s hand, there would have a been a lot of homage and cultural references here in the attempt to enliven the 60’s setting, but in the Danish Lone Sherfig’s hands, the central focus does not stray away from the very heart of this story – Jenny’s journey to self-awakening. With the entire film heavily laden on its central protagonist, Carey Mulligan does an exceptional job in keeping Jenny away from mere caricature but a truly believable human being, one who knows what she was doing yet logically denies the artificiality around her for the purpose of experiencing life beyond school gates. Mulligan delivers perhaps one of the strongest female performances of the year, with an unforced charm, tactility and precise calculation, as though she had scrupulously sat down with the script and carefully creates Jenny’s quips and tics. Onscreen, each of Mulligan’s gesture – wrinkling of nose, opening of lips, arching of an eyebrow and cut-glass elocution – becomes Jenny’s manifestation, making the character so wonderfully, exhilaratingly alive. An Oscar nomination would certainly be an understatement.

VERDICT:

RATING: A