an education

con Peter Sarsgaard, Carey Mullingan
Altri interpreti: Emma Thompson, Alfred Molina

25/30

Why does the representation of the '60s (or otherwise of the '50s), if designed in retrospect, must necessarily be neat, clean and sterile? Why the alleged purity of a generation, that quivered in the flesh, must invade the scene, as to create an almost theatrical representation of people and places that seem a schematically written sociological treaty on a passed era ?  Why do we feel like inhabiting a tv serial?

(By the way: as for the formal representation of the past, are we so sure that those hair are late Fifties instead of early '60s?).  

Why we seem to go for a stroll in the cold repetition of a TV series? "That '60s Show" sort of say, but without the audience's laughter, the jokes and the irony in it?

Without saying we' re talking Nick Hornby (another adaption from a novel by the golden guy!), a.k.a. the epithome of Memory mixed with the abundance of descriptive details and some sour melancholy for what will never return. 

This is not Hornby, guys: this is a Bildungsroman that crosses "Little Women", though previously washed away in a dark bleach... 

The emotional maturity of a sheltered teen in post-war austerity Britain is pictured here in the boldly elemental adaptation of journalist Lynn Barber's unsparing memoir of her formative years. In the post-Absolute Beginners society of 1961 London, where suited dandies in coffee shops bask in a fast-maturing mod culture, precocious 16-year-old Jenny (cool but somehow disoriented Carey Mulligan) is an outsider powerless to shake loose the strictures enforced by her aspirational middle-class parents.

The same old story...

 Picked up by the side of the road one rainy day by David (Peter Sarsgaard), Jenny is soon being regularly chauffeured into an almost-swinging London of foreign cinemas and art museums. Her dazzlement and uncertain footing in these adult environs

is shown in a series of spots where she' s introduced to the world of adults who claim to traverse across generational obligations by getting rid of the option "work" to dive into the weird dynamics of an alleged "art business" (stealing paintings). 

Mulligan, instead of letting go of emotions and emotional thrust, walks into an almost macabre, stiff, cold, "mis en scene", where they celebrate the funeral of relational dynamics.

Mulligan's performance, though, is sometimes also a thing of understated beauty, instinctively attuned to that headstrong quality common to the most aware teenagers. That Mulligan's excess of talent occasionally throws light onto groaningly conventional aspects of Education's storyline is perhaps inevitable, though noticeable, particularly in scenes opposite her stiff  father (Alfred Molina) and mother (Cara Seymour).

 I'm not here recounting the rest of the plot, but I can certainly point out that almost a secondary element of the plot of Hornby, instead, becomes the only essential key to justify the second weak part of the film, where the movie turns into a duet between Mulligan and Sarsgaard.

25:03:2009