An Education Review (London Film Festival)
Director: Lone Scherfig
Writers: Lynn Barber (memoir), Nick Hornby (screenplay)
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, Carey Mulligan, Alfred Molina, Rosamund Pike

Carey Mulligan stars as Jenny, a girl living in 60s London who plans to go to Oxford University after taking her final exams in secondary school. She has a bright future ahead of her, and has started to see Graham, a well-meaning boy from her school. One day, when Jenny is caught in the rain after music practice, David (Peter Sarsgaard) offers to give her a ride home, and things get a bit messy from there. David is a lot older than Jenny, but offers a much more exciting life than the one that she’s been living – expensive restaurants, concerts and trips to Paris and Oxford. Jenny can’t resist David’s charms, and neither can her parents, who are completely won over by him.

Jenny is introduced to David’s friends, Danny (Dominic Cooper) and Helen (Rosamund Pike), who’re are just as exciting and entertaining as David is. Pike’s frivolous and shallow Helen is a great counterpoint to Mulligan’s studious and thoughtful Jenny, and the interplay between the pair is worth the price of admission alone. It’s especially interesting to watch Jenny’s character become something that resembles Helen’s more closely, and to consider all of the implications of that transformation. Jenny couldn’t be happier with her newfound life, until she finds out a dark secret of David’s… and it’s one of many.

Meanwhile Jenny’s teachers (Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson) despair at her blossoming relationship with David, which so clearly jeopardises her academic future. There’s Oscar buzz (yes, already) surrounding Carey Mulligan’s performance, and it’s the role that got her a part in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel Money Never Sleeps, and it’s easy to see why. Mulligan is enchanting on screen, effortlessly taking the audience along with her on Jenny’s emotional journey as the character comes of age. But Mulligan’s performance isn’t the only one worth mentioning: Alfred Molina steals every scene he’s in as Jenny’s father, his comic timing is impeccable, and when the moment requires pathos he delivers in equal measure – Nick Hornby’s script really allows the audience to understand how this character’s 1960s mind works.

The film’s neat and quick ending is one of its few shortcomings, but overall the film does a remarkable job of representing its time, and does well telling a story about a character that could have only existed during that period, a young woman who has opportunities not afforded to the generation before her that has to make serious decisions about what direction her life is headed.

Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
Our Grade: B+

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