The opening sequence of An Education, Lone Scherfig's classic if largely unremarkable coming-of-age story, features familiar images of uniformed schoolgirls being put through their finishing school paces. They glide with books on their heads, practice their waltz steps, and whip pasty batter to an expert smoothness. It's 1961, in Twickenham, England, and the notion of educating women has reached a critical juncture; despite making expansive gestures toward equal opportunity for girls, both the education and social systems are still most invested in preparing them not for life but for a man.
The choice facing Jenny (Carey Mulligan) the young woman at the center of the story, seems sorted in the film's early scenes: She's going to Oxford, and despite no small amount of pressure from her overbearing father, it's a prospect she relishes on its own terms. Jenny wants to read the great books, steep herself in art and culture, and cavort with precocious tweedies who drop precious French idioms as frequently and erroneously as she does. It's a picture of an education, rather than a clear idea, but it will do. And yet there is something amiss in the extent to which Jenny must amass "interests" and "hobbies" specifically for the purpose of pleasing admissions committees -- is it really that far off from cultivating an interest in cooking or polo to attract a man?
The answer to that, at least as far as Jenny's parents go (they are played by Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina), is difficult, disappointing, and true. Still a few notches below bourgeois and not quite working class, Jenny's parents see her education in the abstract -- something to perform or possess rather than experience or embody, an attitude that to some extent earns the contempt she heaps on them. The arrival of David (Peter Sarsgaard) brings the ambivalence of their position to the fore; with a grown man to take care of you, why bother to enroll in the great marital sweepstakes alternatively known as higher education? In a scene right out of a Police song, David pulls up to Jenny as she stands at the bus stop in the pouring rain and offers shelter for her cello, a clutch move that eventually convinces her to climb in as well. Needless to say, his car is warm and dry. The scene is one of several liberties writer Nick Hornby took with the story, which is based on a memoir by Lynn Barber published in a 2003 issue of Granta, and it's a fitting introduction for the strange, coaxing yet surprisingly uncreepy relationship that develops between the characters.
Jenny, with her deep, dulcet voice and droll intelligence, certainly sounds older than 16, but with her rounded features and hipless frame, she looks about 12. Nevertheless, the 30-something David's advances seem based more in power and enchantment than predatory intent (although that's generally the mark of an elite predator). David also shares Jenny's contempt for her parents, though he expresses it by seducing them in the most banal way possible, convincing them to let him take Jenny to a symphony with hand kisses and "Jenny, I didn't know you had a sister!" pandering. What any of these characters is thinking is hard to fathom, and the liberties the film takes on that account, particularly with David's character, who is left largely in the dark, suggests that the point is they are not exactly thinking, but working off of purely personal motivation. Which is understandable in high school; the rest of them have some explaining to do.
David exploits Jenny's parents by opening them up to who they think they are, or want to be, and Jenny, for all her worldly affectations, gets taken just as easily. New clothes, new hair, trips to dining clubs and Oxford and Paris -- to her they are exactly what she deserves, and her conviction blinds her to the fact that this "hands-on" version of an education is being bestowed on her, and at a price. In fact David and the mediated window on the world he offers is not adventure and unconvention but the very safety she flouts, as the eagerness with which her parents greet their engagement makes clear. Poverty, on the other hand, especially of the ceaseless, grinding but not quite obliterative version often attached to a life of intellectual and artistic pursuits, is many things, but safe is not one of them. Having figured this out early, David, along with his friend Danny (Dominic Cooper) are involved in shady art and real estate hustling; the latter develops an interest in pre-Raphaelites simply because the market for them opened up. Like most of the cello-playing strivers in Jenny's class, David and his friends are only interested in art as a means to an end.
When Jenny's comeuppance comes it is swift and absolute, if a little trite. Olivia Williams appears as Jenny's teacher and Emma Thompson as the school's headmistress, and they provide the requisite dowdy contrast to Jenny's naïve and yet not altogether wrong ideas about how a young woman might go about getting an education. "I suppose you think I'm a ruined woman," Jenny says in the aftermath of some seriously bad decision-making. This elicits a searing, dismissive chuckle from Thompson: "You're not a woman," she retorts.
What this striking and yet strikingly conventional film touches on most achingly is the paradox of girlhood I fear towers today only inches below the heights it reached in 1961: Not only is a young woman at once this society's most protected and most expendable quantity, but one might travel between those extremities at a moment's whim and on a daily basis. Mulligan's much-noted performance captures the ferocity and self-possession, along with the wit and pique, that a girl needs to make it across that gauntlet -- to become a woman -- with some semblance of identity intact.