Charmed and schooled

Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard and Lone
Scherfig on An Education, their acclaimed
coming-of-age story set in 1960s Britain

ROMANTIC ROLE REVERSAL: Mulligan and Sarsgaard

by MARK SLUTSKY

Some movies seem to capture an exact moment, a precise point in space and time, so well that you can’t imagine the stories they tell taking place anywhere else. Such is the case with Danish director Lone Scherfig’s An Education, a charming coming-of-age story set in the Britain of the early 1960s, in the brief instant between the grim years of rationing that followed the war and the flowering of the ’60s.

Newcomer Carey Mulligan plays Jenny, a bright teenager who dreams of escaping the confines of her girls’ school, her loving but overbearing parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and, in general, the drabness of her suburban existence. Salvation arrives in the form of David (Peter Sarsgaard), a dashing, stylish and surprisingly vulnerable older man who introduces her to his sophisticated London and Paris world of fashion, restaurants and art, offering tantalizing access to the already brewing cultural changes that would soon sweep the decade. Managing to charm even her parents, Sarsgaard offers Mulligan a way out—but not, perhaps, on her own terms.

With a screenplay by Nick Hornby (based on an autobiographical essay by Lynn Barber), An Education gently evokes the flavour of life in the Britain of the time and the sense, probably common to teenagers everywhere, that there must, somehow or somewhere, be something greater or more important out there.

“It is so much about London and someone who could only have lived in London at that time,” says Scherfig, speaking to the Mirror at the Toronto International Film Festival. “And so much about that little pocket in time when, as Nick said, they didn’t know that when they were walking around, there the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were recording their first albums. It was right before everything changed. Jenny had still grown up with food rationing; London at that time was still bombed and people were very afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of excess of any kind.”

EVOKING BRITAIN’S BLEAKNESS: Scherfig

ACTING THEIR AGE

At the centre of the film is the relationship between Mulligan and Sarsgaard, easily at least 15 years her senior, at a time when a thirtysomething could conceivably date a teenager without raising too many eyebrows if he had the right intentions. And yet, it never feels quite sleazy, and much of the ambiguity is thanks to Sarsgaard’s nuanced performance. “There would have been a way to play this guy, like, in a smoking jacket, know what I mean?” he says. “I really could have played him as an older man. The one thing that I knew going in was that I had to be younger than she was. Any chance I had, any scene, especially when we were alone, I tried to find the place where I was forcing her to be the older person. The more reasonable person.”

“I think that was really clever about how Lone directed us,” says Mulligan. “The way Peter played it, to me, he never felt predatory. And Lone made sure that Jenny pushed the romance as much as he did. She leans in for the kiss—she sets up that whole first kiss. She says ‘I’ll lose my virginity when I’m 17.’ She kind of puts that on the table. In Paris, she puts her arm on him, she’s kissing him, she’s driving it as much as he is. She’s not a girl being manipulated, she knows what she’s doing.”

In fact, that subtle turning of the tables is present everywhere in the film—you could say that the education of the title is really how Mulligan’s character learns to take control of the power dynamics that might otherwise define her. “With her teachers, she goes from being an A student who idolizes them to telling them what’s what and leaving,” Mulligan says. “With her friends, she goes from being sort of on a par with them to being the coolest girl in the school because she’s got this older man. With her parents, she becomes the authority—by the end of the film, she has no respect for them. I think what’s brilliant about what Peter does is that he’s often more childlike than she is.”

“It’s clearly not about sex,” says Sarsgaard. “Usually things like this are about power, right, but in this situation, I think it’s really about how he’s allowing himself to be overpowered by her. About somebody who’s throwing himself into a massive wave and just needing to be overcome by something, in the way that people are overcome at first love. I think, just like her, he’s trying to escape the circumstances of his life.”

AN EDUCATION OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 23