An indoctrination

(An Education (2009), directed by Lone Scherfig, written by Lynn Barber, Nick Hornby, with Carey Mulligan, Olivia Williams, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Matthew Beard, Peter Sarsgaard, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike)

What made Italian for Beginners and especially the wonderful Wilbur (wants to kill himself) into great films was the punctilious warmth with which Lone Scherfig observed her characters in their full, occasionally awkward but always endearing (and respectable) quirkiness. The scripts of About a boy and in particular of the almost perfect High Fidelity were great because Nick Hornby knew his characters well and fleshed out their voices and circumstances with earnest, original comments and twists.

In An education however, Hornby seems to bank on easy laughs and the occasional blood-curdling heart-to-heart, at the expense of what might have been more realistic dialogues and a more balanced, less rushed character revelation. Scherfig shoots the script well in terms of a both significant and pleasant visual impact, but doesn’t do much to make her characters any less stereotypical. We are treated with a philistine middle-class father who rates rich husbands as high as Oxford degrees in terms of life success; a wise housewife with an unfulfilled fun streak; an earnest but awkward schoolboy; bitchy but awkward schoolgirls (obligatorily much less pretty than the heroine); a pretty and worldwise but grotesquely dumb wife of a rich but shady businessman; two rich but shady businessmen; a long-suffering wife (obligatorily much less pretty than the heroine) who takes an interest in mothering her husband’s adolescent lovers; a stiff-glassed, unmarried English teacher with a Cambridge degree (obligatorily much less pretty than anybody); a school principal who takes pleasure in warning students whose lives she is about to destroy that they are about to destroy their lives (obligatorily ugly); and the heroine, who starts her journey singing along to Juliette Greco’s songs, loses her virginity to a shady businessman on a trip to Paris, and ends the film voice-overing her acceptance to a trip to Paris with her boyfriend. All these make for static characters who take no noticeable pains and seem to gain nothing much. Bouts of good acting from people like Peter Sarsgaard or Cara Seymour, Carey Mulligan’s beauty and the talent of the whole cast may add a bit of depth to the script; it is also true that the general style of the film resembles a typical flick from the 60s, so what I perceive as shallowness might be there by design (perhaps aiming to show Jenny’s view of the world, and not the world itself). Nevertheless, it is hard to escape the feeling that while Jenny ends up taking the hard but honest path to fulfilment, the script of An education, and to some extent its direction too, make the opposite choice. The result, as expected, is a film that is good fun and professionally made but doesn’t really teach its audience very much at all. (The two pre-Raphaelite paintings are extraordinary beautiful and affecting though, literally apt to turning one’s world upside-down though; I wish they were made into more than mere stage props).

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