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Carey Mulligan charms as a teen dazzled by an older man in a bittersweet romance based on Lynn Barber's 1960s memoirs, says Philip FrenchIn the 1980s, David Puttnam produced a series of films for TV and cinema under the title First Love, the aim being to bring in new movie-makers and writers to work on personal themes in British settings.
The most notable was Pat O'Connor's somewhat atypical Cal, where the love affair was between an IRA gunman and the widow of a police officer he's killed.
Otherwise, they tended towards bittersweet romanticism of a nostalgic kind and An Education, adapted by Nick Hornby from journalist Lynn Barber's memoir of her 1960s schooldays, would have fitted perfectly into this series.Indeed, two of the most attractive First Love films were semi-autobiographical works scripted by contemporaries of Barber's: Those Glory Glory Days, inspired by Julie Welch's passion for Danny Blanchflower's Spurs team of 1960-61, and The Frog Prince, Posy Simmonds's witty account of her adolescent sojourn in 1960 Paris, fending off amorous French youths and losing her virginity to one of them.An Education is set in 1962, the heroine is 16-year-old London schoolgirl Jenny Miller (Carey Mulligan), the only child of conventional, lower-middle-class parents, and the film's title has a double meaning, one scholastic, the other sentimental.
First, it refers to her sixth-form work at a Twickenham girls' school, the prize pupil of Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), her intense English teacher, and the imminent prospect of winning a place at Oxford that will transform her life.
It also refers to the dangerous relationship that begins when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a seemingly wealthy charmer, gives her a lift home in his Bristol sports car one rainy day and that threatens to deflect her disastrously from this liberating future.The world of the early 60s is well established: this period of Macmillan's "Never had it so good" Britain, immediately before 1963, that pivotal year apostrophised by Philip Larkin, when the Profumo scandal opened up to view a different, more corrupt nation, and the Beatles, the Stones and the great train robbers ushered in the swinging 60s and the permissive society.Danish director Lone Scherfig seems at home in Britain and the details of clothes, haircuts and so on are dead right.
The period comes uncannily back as Jenny lies in her bedroom listening to a Juliette Gréco LP (France was then the acme of cultural sophistication) playing on a Dansette record player.
The horrors of lower-middle-class suburbia, intended no doubt subjectively to suggest Jenny's revulsion and alienation, are rather caricatured in the performance of Alfred Molina as her humourless, insecure, bullying father.It is also a pity that in order to build her up as a rebellious outsider, Jenny's two closest chums are presented as giggly admirers and the other girls in her class as dull, unimaginative frumps incapable of responding to King Lear and Jane Eyre with a sensitivity and intelligence comparable to Jenny's.
Equally, Miss Stubbs, admirably played by Olivia Williams, is seen as a spinster, possibly a lesbian unfulfilled by her life of culture, and while the headmistress (Emma Thompson) may have harboured a traditional middle-class anti-semitism, one wonders whether the corresponding character in real life would have been so strident in her denunciation of Jews as Christ-killers.Of Carey Mulligan's wonderful performance there can be no doubt.
She exudes vitality and an unformed inner grace and she blossoms under the attentions of David, whose dubious friends are the charismatic spiv Danny (Dominic Cooper) and the beautiful, amoral airhead Helen (Rosamund Pike).
The latter gives Jenny a makeover that recreates her as Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the hit movie of the moment.
David, who at his first meeting with Jenny identifies himself as Jewish, wins over her parents with his wit and worldly charm and introduces her to a glittering world of classical concerts, nightclubs, greyhound tracks and fast cars.But David soon reveals himself to the audience, though only partially to Jenny, as a liar, a confidence trickster, a thief and an associate of Peter Rachman, the Polish property racketeer who become infamous the following year when, after his death, his connection with the Profumo affair was revealed (both Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler had been his mistresses) and the term "Rachmanism" was coined.
But so in thrall to his gaudy lifestyle does she become that she eventually allows him to take her virginity on a trip to Paris for her 17th birthday.What David wants we can only guess at, and at the end we're invited to conclude that he has a psychopathic inability to consider the consequences of his actions.
The movie ends wistfully with Duffy singing Smoke Without Fire: "If I had known you were cheating me/ I would have saved myself and set you free."We're not told what happened to David.
We see Jenny scraping into Oxford (though the film errs in her being offered a place by the English faculty rather than by a college) and start dating boys her own age.
We guess that the experience shaped Lynn Barber, the ace interviewer, by making her wary of the persona people present to the world.
But her piece in the Observer four years ago about accompanying Ronnie Wood and Tracey Emin to an endless succession of fashionable drunken parties at the Venice Biennale suggests she retains her taste for louche company.
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