An Education

Beware of Strangers Bearing Champagne

Literature is full of cautionary tales of innocent young women seduced by smooth-talking rakes. Jenny, a dutiful student and a passionate consumer of modern novels and French pop records, has surely encountered more than a few such stories. But at 16 and in a terrible hurry, she seems less inclined to learn from the mistakes of wayward romantic heroines than to join their ranks.
In a Henry James novel, Jenny would be an eager American ingénue arriving in Europe to drain the cup of experience to its dregs. But in “An Education,” a sprightly and slippery new film adapted from a short, sharp memoir by the British journalist Lynn Barber, she is a middle-class adolescent, languishing in the London suburb of Twickenham in 1961.
Jenny, played with preternatural wit by the 24-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan, is passionate, inquisitive and smart, bound for Oxford and stifled by her starchy private school and her anxious, proper parents (Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina ).
One rainy afternoon, a snake slithers into the drab little garden of Jenny’s life, and her curiosity about this suave stranger is accompanied by a sense of relief. At last, something is going to happen. He seems quite harmless at first — interesting, but not in a dangerous way. His name is David, he is around 30, reasonably handsome (played by the quietly dashing Peter Sarsgaard ), Jewish and fluent in a language of style and culture that Jenny is only beginning to learn. Noticing that she is lugging her cello, David chats with her about the British composer Edward Elgar, and before she knows it, he is squiring her to art auctions and concerts, plying her with Champagne and cigarettes and airy, high-minded talk.
Another shoe is sure to drop, but the director, Lone Scherfig, and the screenwriter, Nick Hornby, let it float gradually and gently to the ground. It is vital to the movie’s delicate, comic tone that intimations of the predatory, duplicitous aspects of David’s character do not emerge too suddenly. Jenny is smitten, and so, rather astonishingly, are her parents, in particular her conservative and unworldly father, who all but delivers his daughter to her seducer tied up in a bow, believing that this is an opportunity for her social advancement.
The audience, too, needs to be fooled for a while, and Mr. Sarsgaard handles a tricky role with sly aplomb, allowing doubt and then revulsion to mix, drop by drop, into our impression of him. David and his fabulous friends, Danny and Helen ( Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike), turn out not to be the high-living swells Jenny takes them for, but something rather more tawdry. And yet, even as she begins to see through them, and David in particular, Jenny plays along with their charade, as if determined to follow her experiment to its conclusion.
This turns out to be both foreseeable and surprising. Jenny makes no secret of her relationship with David, which becomes the talk of her school, attracting the concern of a sad, kindly young teacher (Olivia Williams) and the fierce disapproval of the headmistress ( Emma Thompson, taking a practice run at her inevitable portrayal of Margaret Thatcher ).
But Jenny’s course is set. It’s not that she’s out of control — quite the contrary. She is deliberately and systematically, with what she imagines to be full knowledge of the consequences, seeking out what the vestigial Victorianism of her era would see as her ruin.
And the era itself is the real subject of “An Education,” which catches Britain around the time when, as Philip Larkin put it in his famous poem, “sexual intercourse began.” There is a bit of that stuff in “An Education,” but it’s more the symbol of other kinds of experience than the reverse. What Jenny craves is not the fact of sex — though she does make sure to schedule the loss of her virginity — but full access to an ideal of sexiness, a world that is the opposite of the boring little England she knows and loathes. Even as David is taking advantage of her innocence, she is, at first unwittingly and then more brazenly, using him to find her way to that world, which she identifies especially with France.
In the film’s historical view Jenny is a generational pioneer, and Ms. Scherfig and Mr. Hornby make some effort to reckon the costs of her exploration as well as the thrills. Tears do flow after the Champagne is all drunk. But the filmmakers themselves seem too intoxicated by the mystique of the period to take full account of the sad, bleak aspects of the story they have to tell. At crucial moments the movie recoils from its own implications and finds a default tone of wry comedy when something more stringent and difficult is called for.
But if in hindsight “An Education” might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself. Some of this allure arises from the appeal of a moment in the past that seems, in “Mad Men” and beyond, to be enjoying some cultural cachet. And Ms. Scherfig, a Danish filmmaker whose previous work includes “Italian for Beginners,” the only comedy the Dogme 95 movement has ever produced, and the morbidly charming “Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself,” catches some of the headlong energy of the British and French New Waves that were part of Jenny’s world.
Even as its heroine blazes a path toward the new, “An Education,” perhaps inevitably, drifts toward nostalgia. The film might have had some of the heft and complication of a novel but instead, as with so much of Mr. Hornby’s work, like “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy,” it is content to be a deftly turned pop artifact. It’s a pleasure — which I don’t mean entirely as a compliment.
“An Education” is rated PG-13. Its sexual implications are not as troubling as they should be.
Da The New York Times, 9 Ottobre 2009