An Education

These are my notes for this week's screening:

An Education


UK 2009 (95 minutes)

Director: Lone Scherfig

Starring: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike and Emma Thompson

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for three Oscars: Best Film, Best Actress (Carey Mulligan) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nick Hornby)

• A further 18 wins and 45 nominations including a BAFTA Award for Best Actress for Carey Mulligan and seven further nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Outstanding British Film

In 1961 London Jenny Millar (Carey Mulligan), a 16 year old schoolgirl in the process applying to Oxford, meets a charming older man David Goldman (Peter Sarsgaard) who starts taking her out and then charms her parents into accepting the relationship. Jenny eventually realises that Goldman is a con man, but nonetheless accepts his proposal of marriage and drops out of school – and then she discovers that he is already married. Jenny returns to school to renew her studies and next year is accepted at Oxford.

The film is based on an autobiographical memoir by the journalist Lynn Barber who as a schoolgirl had an affair with conman Simon Prewalski, an associate of Peter Rachman before reading English at St Anne’s College Oxford. The script is by Nick Hornby, better known as the author of novels such as Fever Pitch, About A Boy, and High Fidelity, who explained in an interview what drew him to the story:

“She’s a suburban girl who’s frightened that she’s going to get cut out of everything good that happens in the city. That, to me, is a big story in popular culture. It’s the story of pretty much every rock ‘n’ roll band.”

The story also has echoes of the kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s like Billy Liar and A Taste of Honey although the trouble that Jenny gets to is the – potential – loss of her Oxford career. The film concludes with Jenny at Oxford remarking in a voiceover: “I probably looked as wide-eyed, fresh and artless as any student. But I wasn’t.” This is, if anything, an understatement: as Lynn Barber revealed during a recent appearance on Desert Island Discs, she managed to sleep with more than 50 men during two terms at Oxford.

Carey Mulligan received unanimous praise for her performance as Jenny in what was only her second film appearance. She played Kitty Bennet in Joe Wright’s version of Price and Prejudice (2005) and then spent three years playing leading roles in a number of TV programmes including Ada Clare in Bleak House and Sally Sparrow in Blink (one of the best Doctor Who stories ever). Following the international success of An Education she was cast in a co-starring role in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Oliver Stone’s sequel to Wall Street (1987) and will appear shortly in a starring role with Keira Knightley in Never Let Me Go (2010), from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which will receive its first screening at the 2010 London Film Festival.