An Education

Difficult, being a young romantically inexperienced teenaged student studying hard to be accepted by Oxford while dealing with the daily complications of social and familial life. In Lone Scherfig's An Education, we meet such a person named Jenny (Carey Mulligan), an ambitious confused high-spirited girl attending an exclusively female school in London during the 1960s. Things proceed as per usual until the free-spirited thrity-something handsome heartthrob David (Peter Sargaard) enters her life by offering her a ride. The two hit it off and both Jenny and her parents are overwhelmed by David's manners, culture, gifts, and charm. Musical performances, trips to the country, a weekend in Paris, dinner and dancing: an enticing and exciting courtship ensues. But things aren't as austere as they originally seem to be, and the bright and promising future David offers may be nothing more than dust in the wind.

An Education intelligently examines what can be thought of as future prospects from multiple angles. Each adult represents a different potential life path for Jenny and she's bewildered by the options. Should she spend her life studying dry literature in dusty educational institutions just so she can wind up teaching dry literature in dusty educational institutions? If she marries rich will her future be secure as her father (Alfred Molina) hopes? Should she emulate her mother (Cara Seymour) and wind up reserved and complacent after years of predictable middle-class married life? Or follow Helen's (Rosamund Pike) fashionably fast-paced footsteps, sacrificing knowledge for glamour in an epicurean salute to the avant-garde?

The point is, it's difficult to be young, and boring to be proper, and when exhilarating opportunities arise it's easy to let them take control. And youth and financial insecurity are sincere motivators as Jenny's father regrettably points out. If you make the "wrong" decision and follow a problematic path, you will certainly face consequences for your actions. But An Education demonstrates that such consequences are by no means absolute which is refreshing to see since so many films rely on melodramatic retributive constructs to "dramatically" tie things together.

Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is a pretty cool film too.