(With Sundance rapidly wrapping up and an intimidating backlog of films to write about, I’ll be publishing a number of brief capsule reviews over the next few days. If a specific title piques your interest and you’d like to see a more substantial review, let me know in the comments.)
Lone Scherfig’s An Education is an extremely classy film –– classy as in modish, classy as in overtly concerned with class, and both ultimately at the expense of digging as deep as it could into the gut ugliness of first heartbreak. It’s about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), an Oxford-bound beauty in 1960s suburban London, the pet of an old maid-ish English teacher (Olivia Williams) and a worthy sparring opponent for her protective dad (a sharply funny Albert Molina), who takes a vacation from smart-girl responsibility in order to lose herself in the charms of the much older David (Peter Sarsgaard). David picks her up one rainy day and proceeds to insinuate himself into the schoolgirl’s boring, middle-class life, charming her unsophisticated parents into allowing him to take their daughter on weekend trips, tempting her with the lifestyle of the full-time consort, and eventually endangering her virtue, her standing at her uptight all-girls prep school, and her future.
Oh, young love! When An Education works, it’s because it’s capable of recreating the insane fog of love, particularly first love, which always feels like last love. To the outside eye, Jenny is a foolish girl making choices with her heart and libido at the expense of her head, but in the film’s most interesting angle, Scherfig and Hornby approach Jenny’s escape to romance as a political decision. In a post-WWII world, an antebellum age between The Blitz and The Beatles, where the spectre of mass destruction is very real just outside Jenny’s bedroom community and her Jewish boyfriend is still an outsider, she feels she’s making an informed decision to live life to the fullest while that option is still available to her. The proto-feminist option — to go as far as possible academically at the expense of expanding her horizons emotionally, with little potential reward in sight –– is, compared to the life David promises of sports cars and cocktails and other shadily acquired luxuries, a death sentence. Watching An Education, you could only wonder why such a smart, rational, good girl would so easily abandon middle class morality and lose her head so many points along the way, if you’ve either never fallen so deeply under the spell of another, or you have and have opted to forget that momentary loss of control.
Ultimately An Education seems to take the latter option. After revealing the truth about David and Jenny’s relationship, Education opts for a kind of willfull forgetting about the ways in which youthful romantic obsession leaves its mark on relationships moving forward. The film resolves itself so easily that the last couple of scenes play as if there were a serious scene missing before the camera-drifting-off-into-the-clouds sign-off. Never, up to this point, in charge of telling her own story, Jenny suddenly reveals her inner monolgue via voice-over in the film’s tacked-on coda. Her “and life goes on” reflections are very sensible, very classy, and very weirdly cheery, as if this girl has casually pushed aside the “education” she recieved at the hands of her older boyfriend, as if it had never happened. An Education works as a fever dream of first love, but the wake-up is oddly unsatisfying.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth