Postcards from the Girlhood: Lone Scherfig, An Education

An Education (2009)
Directed by Lone Scherfig

The main quality of Lone Scherfig’s An Education is that it has the right actors when the plot seems to develop into something you’ve already seen. No matter how many Lolitas you’ve already seen (apparently) being seduced by older men, Carey Mulligan is simply worth watching as another impersonation of the type. In An Education, she’s a 16-year-old schoolgirl, giggling almost all the time and being ingénue to the point you cannot do anything else but find excuses for her. Peter Sarsgaard, as her love interest, is David, a playboy who is into arts and music as much ad he’s into beautiful girls; but his character seems to be so natural, even if we notice hoe manipulative can he be, that the last few minutes of the film seem rater odd than shocking. For director Lone Scherfig and screenwriter Nick Hornby, there isn’t much in the life of a 16-year-old girl besides school and family; hence, you’ll hear a lot of conversations back home between Jenny and her reckless father, played by an actor that seemed lost for the big screen somewhere back in 2002 or 2003, Alfred Molina. As Jenny’s father, he is nevertheless brilliant as a near grotesque combination of ridiculousness and a sort of tragic figure. Lone Scherfig, who had hardly directed anything else but comedies, beginning with her Dogme 95 exercise in style, Italian for Beginners, manages to acquire from her three stars, Mulligan, Sarsgaard and Molina, great, nuanced performances, transforming for the better a plot that didn’t seem to make a notable difference in the coming-of-age genre. Of great help seem to be also a few episodic characters, as Jenny’s ambiguously oppressive headmistress (Emma Thompson), arguably the one character that really opposes her plans, or the cartoonish femme fatale Jenny meets when she starts dating David, Helen (Rosamund Pike). But the film is almost too brief for its own good: in almost 90 minutes, there is not that much time for establishing real conflicts between the characters. The way Jenny and David seem to take anything that happens to them half-seriously, without any introspection, doesn’t let you, as a viewer, to take anything about them seriously, either.

There is something in the mood of An Education that makes you believe reality (here, meaning that “reality” opposed to the appearances) is sometimes harsh, but never unbearable. This is why the film is always “light”, even when it’s supposed to depict dramatic incidents, as it does in the end. Guilty for this permanent mood is the script. If you read the actual autobiography written by Lynn Barber, the source of inspiration for screenwriter Nick Hornby (http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jun/07/lynn-barber-virginity-relationships), “David” is rather ambivalent, from Barber’s perspective: definitely not that handsome, although that rich, he is rather unprincipled and vaguely charming. Furthermore, his marriage proposal is waited with a sort of pride, but never accepted. As Lynn Barber seems to have a more harsh perspective about her past, Nick Hornby dilutes the facts and presents a manufactured version of a romance, including snappy, clever dialogue and an awareness for the bright side of the events. When you listen to his dialogue, a whole Hollywood tradition of screenwriting comes to mind. For him and for Scherfig, only what’s enjoyable and memorable is supposed to be present on the big screen; as a result, David’s affair is the sum of (almost) all the unrepressed moments of a love story. In the beginning of the film, we witness Jenny listening to a French chansonnette and probably dreaming about Paris; well, the Paris she is visiting later in the film is exactly that Paris: passionate, with French chansonnettes played by phonographs, shiny and without a dull moment. An Education is about that kind of “reality” that you remember with a sort of nostalgia, precisely because you forgot all the uncomfortable facts, a reality suitable for postcards and photo albums and fitting generously the aesthetic of the film, which translates the coming-of-age experiences through snapshots. Even if like that the characters seem a little more appealing than in the actual story (it’s enough to compare the polished dialogue between Jenny and David when they first meet with Lynn Barber’s factual approach to actually see the difference), it’s because of Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard that the fictional characters nevertheless feel real enough, so real that they could have existed along their true equivalents, back in the sixties.