Young actress Carey Mulligan is the real revelation in this slim, nicely crafted exploration of the social strictures of Sixties London, extracted from journalist Lynn Barber’s memoir.
Mulligan plays Jenny, a clever and sprightly teenage girl who is forced to decide between intellectual independence via a place at Oxford, and marriage to her much older suitor David (Peter Sarsgaard).
Mulligan’s dimpled, sparkly charm and a mercurial skill that enables her to seem both childlike and sophisticated beyond her years, carry a film that might otherwise leave one diverted but thinking "so what?". For this is as much about a particular, and not particularly appetising, set of personalities as it is about the still-stiff, pre-swinging London where girls were supposed to become housewives.
Jenny, like Barber, is uniquely sure of herself. Jenny’s parents, in Nick Hornby’s screenplay, are just as stupid and petit-bourgeois as Barber described hers in her book.
David is a blandly plausible seducer, a Jewish property developer with a taste for the high life and shady business dealings: you feel that Jenny offers herself and her virginity to him in a concerted bid to dash the dust of genteel, gentile Twickenham off her shiny schoolgirl shoes.
Although it’s helmed by a Dane, Lone Scherfig, this is a quintessentially British period piece, so naturally the production design looks great.
Jenny is whisked from the drab suburbs to a world of frogeye Sprite sports cars, champagne schooners, jazz clubs and French cigarettes.
But the pivotal revelation that David’s duplicity extends beyond business isn’t that surprising or even — given the age difference — shocking.
There’s nice support from Dominic Cooper as another tempter and Rosamund Pike (gamely playing a dim trophy girlfriend from whom the lustre is starting to fade). But really, this is Mulligan’s show. Hers is an assured, engaging performance to cherish, and it lifts Scherfig’s film to above the humdrum.
An Education has its premiere tonight as part of the London Film Festival in the Vue West End. Further film festival performances tomorrow and Thursday and the film goes on general release from 30 October.
An Education
Cert: 12A
