An Education
This film starring Carey Mulligan as the 16 year old schoolgirl who has an affair with an older man in the early 1960s has been receiving a lot of notice with awards, good reviews and Oscar nominations. It is always difficult when you know the period and background to a film through personal experience to avoid criticising the details but in this film there are too many mistakes and misjudgements to ignore, especially when you compare the original brief memoir by Lynn Barber on which it is based. (You can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jun/07/lynn-barber-virginity-relationships
It is easy to forgive the fact that the film places the concert to which the girl Jenny is taken in St John’s Smith Square. I remember that this church was converted to a concert hall only in 1969, well after the time in which the action takes place. Unimportant perhaps, but shouldn’t somebody have checked? When she finally receives her acceptance from Oxford (the chance of which she initially abandons to marry the unsuitable lover) it is addressed to her by the University of Oxford. Didn’t anyone involved on the script know that admission to Oxford is only through a college? The business with C S Lewis and the supposed visit to him in Oxford is set up to be unmasked as a falsehood, but it is highly unlikely that the girl would have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at her age. Though it was published it was never very popular with young readers in the early 1950s when she was growing up. The film is also very vague about the Oxford entrance exams which we had to sit after A levels. In fact Jenny gets her A levels and at first withdraws from the entrance examinations. Only on the intervention of her father is she allowed back to take them. What is really annoying though is the way Latin is set up to the representative symbol of the old fashioned nature of her school. This is not the case in the memoir, where Latin is mentioned only as her weakest subject (not surprising as then Latin A level was a difficult subject). In fact in the memoir Lynn Barber mentions the fact that (mirabile dictu, as she says) she got the top grade in it as well top grades as expected in English and French. Latin was required as entrance to English at Oxford at that time and indeed first year English undergraduates had to take a Latin paper. The fictional persona of Lynn Barber in the film is very unlikely to have scorned Latin at A level, and may well have enjoyed it. She may have found it challenging, we all did, but the memoir shows she is proud of her final result. This default denigration of Latin is all to prevalent in English culture where to succeed at something difficult is seen as being a mark of a lack of sophistication. English is fine, French with all that existentialism is a sign of being cool. Why is reading the classic texts of European literature regarded as being a bit odd by English writers and intellectuals? Can it be that it is a bit too much like hard work?
Complaints aside, An Education is a remarkable piece of work, beautifully acted and painstakingly set in its period (visually, at least, but perhaps others are screaming equally loudly that the model of car being driven went out of production before the film’s setting). It is very thought-provoking about the time, especially for anyone who was at school then. Carey Mulligan deserves her Oscar nomination. But why couldn’t they be more careful over the details?
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