Ever since it screened at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it took home both the audience and cinematography awards, An Education has gone on to charm festival audiences worldwide. But even as it’s generating Oscar buzz—especially for its young lead, Carey Mulligan, who’s been hailed the new Audrey Hepburn—the film has also sparked a fair amount of ire along the way, with a few outraged theatergoers dismissing it as “that pedophile movie” for its depiction of the relationship between a precocious 16-year-old girl (Mulligan) and her sophisticated older lover (Peter Sarsgaard).
In actuality, An Educationis less concerned with exploring a taboo—16 is, after all, the age of consent in England—than with telling a story of a girl coming of age in post-war, pre-Beatles Britain. The film’s setting coincides with the current fascination with the sixties just before they started swinging. Like Mad Men and Tom Ford’s upcoming A Single Man, An Education focuses on the brink of epochal change as wool skirts timidly brush up against little black dresses, loafers are traded in for kitten heels, and the taste of tea and biscuits gives way to that of cigarettes and champagne.
The film is written by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy), and adapted from a memoir by British journalist Lynn Barber. Though its director, Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig, is best known as a disciple of the Dogme95 school of bare-bones filmmaking spearheaded by Lars von Trier, the photography and set design mark a lavish departure from the movement’s ascetic rules.
Barber’s memoir, which originally appeared as an essay in the literary magazine Granta, recounted her two-year affair—starting at the age of 16—with a man who said he was 27 but was presumably in his late thirties (though she never knew for sure). After reading the article and recognizing its cinematic potential, Hornby passed it on to his wife, producer Amanda Posey. She, in turn, set about looking for a screenwriter to tackle the story of the teenaged “Jenny” until her husband, suddenly territorial over his find, declared that he was the best man for the job.
“I felt that I understood Jenny’s life,” Hornby says. “That sense of being bored in a suburb of London and frightened that somehow the city is going to shut you out of its life … I know that very much.”
Despite her mundane surroundings in Twickenham, a southwestern suburb of London, Jenny sets her sights on studying English at Oxford—when she isn’t distracted by heavy-lidded French chanteuses and clandestine Sobranie cigarettes. Her hunger for sophistication and cultural enrichment clashes with the bleakness of that period in Britain’s history. Hornby explains it this way: “I have 16,000 songs on my iPod and not one of them was recorded in Britain before 1961.”
Jenny’s curiosity and appetite for a more exciting life lead her to David (Sarsgaard), a sharply dressed man twice her age who offers her cello a ride home in the rain. Charmed by his chivalrous wit and genuine interest in her, she soon puts herself in the car, too, thereby changing the course of her history.
“The age gap was not that much of an issue for me.” Says director Scherfig. “I think it’s one of the many themes that there are in this film; the fact that the film is controversial adds to the flavor of the period. You have cigarettes, racism, a young girl who has a sexual appetite; all of this adds to the credibility, and in a way the innocence of the film.”
The search for the right lead actress, who could convincingly chart Jenny’s course from wide wide-eyed innocence to world-weary disillusion, was particularly daunting. Scherfig says Mulligan “was the one who stood out—we all liked her from the very beginning. She’s real, does not have an acting education, [but] she has taste in her choices. She can carry a film, which is different from just playing the part.”
“I would love to have gone [to drama school],” Mulligan elaborates, “I think it would have given me more confidence to do things on stage that I would like to do. Since I’ve started, I’ve really just watched other people, figuring out how I want to work by watching how other people work, so it’s been a training of sorts. I’ve been lucky to have people to help me.”
Among those people, she singles out her co-star, Peter Sarsgaard, or as he refers to himself, “the American.” Sarsgaard says he used very little of Barber’s description of the real-life man who seduced her when creating the character of David. He adds that his wife, the actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, is seven years his junior to prove his point that,“everyone has really different views on what is appropriate in the name of love.”
“I wanted to play [David] through the eyes of Jenny,” Sarsgaad continues. “In my mind he’s not a consciously manipulative person. I rarely thought, ‘Oh I’m going to put her cello in the car so I can have sex with her,’” Sarsgaard continues, “He’s not thinking like that. I made it my goal to get the cello [out of the rain]. We have this conversation, she’s lovely and interesting, and she puts herself in the car.”
Mulligan adds, “[David’]s never portrayed as a sexual person and certainly not a predator. I think there’s an endearing quality to him in that he’s never been comfortable in a room in his life. He’s just trying to find the room where he feels at home, and I think he finds that [with her].”
The few who throw out the “P” word when referring to An Education are missing the point of this subtly spirited, and finely crafted film entirely. This film is about forging one’s own way to adulthood and gaining an education not just from school but from all of life’s influences.
As Hornby said after the New York premiere on Monday night, the film could have been set at any time and been just as relevant. The sixties just look so much cooler.
An Education (2009)
Directed by: Lone Scherfig
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike, Emma Thompson, Olivia Williams, Carey Mulligan, Dominic Cooper, Alfred Molina, Sally Hawkins, Matthew Beard, Ellie Kendrick, Kate Duchêne
Screenplay by: Nick Hornby
Production Design by: Andrew McAlpine
Cinematography by: John de Borman
Film Editing by: Barney Pilling
Costume Design by: Odile Dicks-Mireaux
Set Decoration by; Anna Lynch-Robinson
Art Direction by: Ben Smith
Music by; Paul Englishby
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual content, for smoking,
Distributed by; Sony Pictures Classics
Release Date: October 9, 2009
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