If you’ve missed Lone Scherfig’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama at the !f Independent Film Festival, here’s your chance to catch it in theaters. 'An Education' tells of the unlikely romance of a 16-year-old girl and a man over twice her age in early 1960s London
The girl, a high-school student named Jenny, meets the charming opportunist twice her age and falls for him in Danish director Lone Scherfig’s Oscar-nominated drama.
If you think you’ve heard this story before, think again.
The early 1960s were still a few years removed from the liberated and swinging London that sink into the collective conscience a few years later. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a straight-A student and destined to study English in Oxford. Her suburban parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) want the best for their only child – a good education, or even better, a rich husband.
As Jenny focuses solely on the possibilities of a good college education, she does her best in balancing a life filled with cello playing, French music, the occasional sneak for a smoke and wielding an acid tongue to the annoyance of her parents.
She’s wise beyond her years and is hungry for life in the way only teenagers are. Then comes along Prince Charming in a sports car on a rainy day. David (Peter Sarsgaard) offers Jenny and her cello a ride. The unexpectedly delightful conversation between Jenny and the 35-year-old bon vivant causes something to click in Jenny. They bump into each other one more time, and then things transform into something altogether different.
Juno in the 60s
David, first, makes it his mission to charm Jenny’s parents, the unsuspecting couple who become all too happy for the affections of this new man in Jenny’s life. Jenny devours everything she craves from David, and his fascinating friends, Danny and Helen (Dominic Cooper of Mamma Mia! and Rosamund Pike) and then some with classical music, fine arts, chic clubs and a chance to travel to Paris.
She’s not, however, ready to give up on this once-in-a-lifetime chance of an education; yes, David is expecting something more but that’s a small price to pay for such a worthy education. Jenny’s words, “All that poetry about something that lasts no time at all,” actually show what small a price she has to pay to this intelligent, charming man with good manners.
The script by British novelist Nick Hornby (About A Boy, Juliet, Naked) – based on the memoirs of the British journalist Lynn Barber – doesn’t play out in any way you would expect the story to. It never becomes a cautionary tale, a critique of society’s norms on sexual conduct, nor a glamorizing of any sort of sexual relations. An Education is simply a coming-of-age story, the pains of growing up, and the burdens of big decisions at a young age.
Otherwise a stilted, impassionate story, the Oscar-nominated Mulligan as Jenny takes the movie in a whole new direction. Her wide-eyed innocence, infectious laugh, and the hard-earned responsibility of feminism urges every woman to strive to make Jenny one of the most memorable teenage characters of cinema in recent years, and Mulligan a star-in-the-making. The ending may be rushed, and certain characters could have done with further work, but this is a movie that respects its teenagers, especially the one at the center of it all. She is, perhaps, Juno beamed half-a-century back.
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