FILM
An Education (12A)
5/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Nick Hornby tells the story of a teenage girl's seduction into a world of glamour by a conman who promises her relief from stifling suburbia.
REVIEW
Don't blink, said the Timelord in a memorable Doctor Who episode back in 2007. Blink and you're dead, he tells Sally Sparrow, played by 22-year-old newcomer Carey Mulligan. Don't look away.
Two years later. You can't blink. Not when she's on-screen. You can't look away. You look away and you're dead - well, maybe not dead but certainly deflated - because, without her, the world of the early 60s, as portrayed by screenwriter Nick Hornby and director Lone Scherfig, is drenched in brown and rain and misery as if the projectionist had spilt coffee on the reel stack then wept over his cack-handed ineptitude.
So you fix your gaze on Carey Mulligan because she entrances and delights and sparkles with such refreshing, uncluttered intelligence that you think - hang the expense I'm building a time machine and heading to Twickenham c.1961 so I can save her from suburban travails and show her a world of music and sex and art and culture.
Then, with the money left over, I'm turning Paris monochrome so it looks like her posters and her album covers and her dreams and she won't ever be disappointed.
And in case your bank manager baulks at the cost, you can show him exactly how that would play out - because that's roughly the story behind An Education (only without the time machine. Or me).
Carey, as Jenny, is being pushed towards Oxford by proud-as-punch parents Jack and Marjorie whose ambitions for their daughter comprise security, fearlessness and a good match in an era in which advancement for women was achieved to the syncopated click-clack of a secretary's Remington.
When dubious, wealthy, man-about-town David (Peter Sarsgaard) asks Mum and Dad to take their 16-year-old away for the weekend, he beguiles them with a vision of colourful and abundant adventure and they immediately chuck thoughts of Oxford over the herbaceous border and convert the stranger into a prospect of equal worth.
But this is no simple story of an ingénue corrupted. When Jenny learns that her parents are not alone in being misled, she becomes complicit in her own seduction, preferring disreputable glamour to double maths, cello practice and a life marking pony essays, like teacher Miss Stubbs (a sternly moving Olivia Williams).
This is an exquisite production. Carey Mulligan shines but Alfred Molina as Jack emerges as the most endearing of the characters as he attempts to manage his daughter's life like she were a wayward lawnmower, forever under- and over-compensating to nail that perfect nap.
Cara Seymour as Marjorie scrubs the pans, sees her daughter aglow and, with a glance, mourns what she has missed. Because the stifling limitations of the era crush lungs and shrink horizons to the size of teacups while twee suburbia is as sweet and brutal as a smack in the face from a paramilitary bon-bon.
Hornby wrings melodic apercus from journalist Lynn Barber's memoir and, together with a cast that includes sterling turns from Emma Thompson, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper, he wraps up a perfect little package that makes a mockery of its modest ambition.
Undoubtedly, the film of the year.
