A film rings the bell of liberation for English teens

{David (Peter Sarsgaard) opens the door of his car and a new life to Jenny (Carey Mulligan) in An Education}

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“An Education,” A Film Rings the Bell Of Liberation for English Teenagers
review: Frederick B. Hudson

The London schoolgirl leaves a brutal confrontation with the headmistress of her secondary school, her cheeks are red, her eyes aflame with indignation at the older woman who tells her she is ruining her life. The girl turns back and shouts a provocative missive at the educator: “if we are going to die, it’s what we do before it occurs!”

This existential précis encapsulates the roller coaster ride the protagonist enjoys and endures in the release on October 9 in New York and Los Angeles of “An Education,” a film that garnered honors at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.



Starring British actress Carey Mulligan in her first leading screen role, the picture, though set in 1960’s England bolds escapes the label of “period piece,” with its strong thematic structure which links eternal themes of adolescent dreams which conflict with adult compromise.

Directed by Danish director Lone Schefig, the film opens with teenaged girls in an all female school dancing with each other; their future male partners are anticipated as the music plays, a symphony of success is heard in their futures if they can just concentrate on their Latin conjugations and English compositions.

But Jenny (played by Mulligan) seeks escape from the demands of her middle class father who tells her after dinner that he wants to hear the sounds of sweat dripping on her schoolbooks. He encourages her to prepare for that bastion of English success—Oxford. In a scene which echoes American parents’ obsession with Ivy League admissions, he tells her that playing cello will look good on her application since it shows she can “fit in.”

Jenny turns her phonograph on and sings along with the love songs of nightclub chanteuses who summons up desires she cannot speak of.

One rainy day after school, an older man with a flashy sport car gives her cello a ride, and lets Jenny walk beside the car as propriety demands; after Jenny tires of the shower she relents and gets in his car. He tells her after hearing of her Oxford education that he has been educated in real life; but he holds her attention with his knowledge of art and music, Jenny’s fascination.

When she sees him again, he offers her tickets to a concert, which she can attend with or without him. Soon an elaborate initiation into the world of nightclubs, art auctions, and real estate business transactions are entered into the ledger book of Jenny’s desire to experience life. The older man, David manages to gain the confidence of Jenny’s parents by claiming he is an Oxford graduate with many influential connections.

Soon David has wrestled control of Jenny from her school. Her peers are fascinated and envious; the headmistress is apprehensive and concerned. Only time will tell as to the outcome.

The well-crafted film uses scenes of nightclub entertainment and business chicanery to depict a period in London when politics and art had weighty concerns that decadence threatened the fabric of English life. Many critics of English life, notably T.S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold, criticized the cultural material, which was crafted for mass audiences in the form of television and film programs as well as radio and phonograph records. A vigorously debated book, The Long Revolution, published in 1961(the same year the film depicts), argued that the absence of moral content in popular literature and the arts would lead to an increase in materialism and less importance in the “managed society” governed by graduates of Oxford.

Indeed, in the years after 1961, the figures of British governmental authority held in esteem previously began to cast in contempt by the general public after major scandals. A Labor Government led by Harold Wilson took over in 1964 and women like Jenny held more administrative posts.

In culture, the success of the defense of the risqué novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover harkened a new confidence of young people’s desire to choose not only their own fashions and music but indeed the right to obtain free contraceptives. The fears of Jenny’s schoolmistress that she might find herself in “a family way” were defused for a generation. Jenny and her classmates were to have a life of their own, with or without Oxford degrees, and to choose their own dance partners and music for generations to come.