An Education

Yes, this is a coming of age story, but with a lot more substance than you might expect. It's based on the autobiography of Lynn Barber (published in June this year, so the adaptation has been lightning quick), which described how, as a sixteen year old, she was seduced by a man almost twice her age in the UK in the early 1960s. An Education smartly matches Jenny's own transition from teen to woman with the eve of London's own transformation into the "swinging" London of the sixties. More than once Jenny remarks that she feels no one in Britain has done anything or been anyone up to now. For her, Paris is where it's at: home of all things cultural, stylish, forbidden (and out of reach).

The performances, generally, are pitch-perfect. Carey Mulligan (as Jenny) gets it just right, portraying a girl who is extremely bright and armed with a growing confidence to speak her mind, but yet still encumbered with a strong naivety and imagination which allows her to be pulled so far off course by a charismatic and predatory stranger. Matching here toe-to-toe, and equally fabulous, is Alfred Molina as the father, a passive aggressive disciplinarian who is nonetheless deeply frightened of the world beyond his doorstep, and of the things Jenny is reaching for: music and travel abroad. His latent aggression comes through strongest in his ambivalent attitude to his daughter's education - pushing her hard to get into Oxford (simply because of the good name of the college, one suspects), while complaining of the cost, but ready to drop this instantly when a marriage proposal from a suitably worthy man seems to be on the table. Molina's father is full of bathos, giving us plenty of moments to laugh at his own small-mindedness inflated into self-superiority.

At the other end of the marriage offer, the predatory stranger, is David (Peter Sarsgaard), a man nearly twice Jenny's age (and the gap in age and experience is made very noticeable). David is given extra allure, as well as a hint of real menace, by being a petty criminal, but the most disturbing thing about him is his dogged pursuit of Jenny, and the extent to which he lies and manipulates her parents to make them complicit in his seduction of her. Jenny sometimes senses the danger, but the temptation of what he represents (everything her parents are not) is too great. Jenny's English teacher and school principal (Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson, respectively - both great in small roles) also try to warn her (not always for the right reasons), but she ignores them in any case, seeing them as another part of the suffocating English establishment she desperately wants to escape.

Interestingly, later in the film the father's ambivalence over Jenny's education is matched by a similar questioning from Jenny herself - she comes to wonder what the point of a university education is when her post-degree career options (as a woman) seem so limited. To its credit, the film doesn't answer or correct her criticism, but leaves the question hanging.

Perhaps a little predictably, the father/daughter relationship is the core of this film, pushing the mother (Cara Seymour) to the side. That's a shame, because the film clearly indicates she has much more of a clue about her daughter's situation, but her suspicions are never picked up on, making me wonder if a scene or two has been cut that would have filled this lapse (and making for a refreshing change, even if the mother's concerns were only privately shared). Still, with two such strong performances from Mulligan and Molina, you may well find no such lack. On dialogue alone, the father is too gullible and too ready to cede control of his daughter's life, but Molina's performance carries us over these gaps in logic. Similarly, Jenny seems to be a little too bold in her retorts to him, but her performance, and the manner is which she voices her resentments as sniping asides, makes us believe anyway. In this company, Sarsgaard is not quite in the same league. He successfully portrays the juvenile aspects of David's character, but not the charm required to lure Jenny and her parents in the first place.

When the truth about Sarsgaard's character is finally revealed to Jenny to wake her from his spell, it is small but perfectly fitting for the times; the effect on her is irrevocable. Like the film, this moment is quiet, intense, interesting, and full of emotion. And, just like David, the film itself seduces with its renditions of Paris (and to a lesser extent, London) in the Sixties; making you ache to time travel back to those moments, even as it gently reminds you of all the awkward facts such nostalgia conceals: racism, class discrimination, and the sexism Jenny is only beginning to sense.