Film review: An Education

AN EDUCATION (12a) ****

DIRECTED BY: LONE SCHERFIG

STARRING: CAREY MULLIGAN, OLIVIA WILLIAMS, PETER SARSGAARD, ALFRED MOLINA, DOMINIC COOPER

SOMETIMES films can be deceptive. If they're enjoyable and well crafted in an unfussy, easy-to-like way, they can often leave you questioning whether there's much going on beneath the surface.

An Education is a bit like that. Adapted by Nick Hornby from journalist Lynn Barber's memoir, and directed with quiet, low-key confidence by Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself), it's the sort of picture that's so effortlessly entertaining that its easy to praise it purely for its superb performances. But the film, which is set in London shortly before the 1960s started to swing, gets at something interesting about British society that we don't normally see in homegrown cinema and it also presents what for once feels like an honest and non-judgmental portrait of a young woman coming of age.

The latter aspect is rare indeed – especially when that process involves a relationship with a much older man. The girl on the brink of adulthood here is Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a bright, vivacious 16-year-old from a hard-working suburban middle-class family.

Her parents, specifically her father (played by Alfred Molina; Cara Seymour plays her mother), are so focused on the value of academic education as the key to getting on, they've effectively mapped out her path in life, dismissing any notions of her actually experiencing it for herself until she gets into Oxford. Even a respectable cultural pursuit like playing the cello is deemed a little unnecessary; it's enough that she's able to list it as her hobby to show the bods on the interview panel that she has extracurricular pursuits, she doesn't need to spend hours practising. God forbid she should actually enjoy it and want to spend valuable studying time going to see actual concerts in London.

But Jenny does love classical music, and she loves French pop too, and art, and all the classic novels she's spent her young life voraciously consuming. Indeed they've instilled in her a romanticised thirst for life, and she wants to drink it all in, otherwise what's the point of all her book learning?

She soon finds an eager facilitator for her more worldly educational ambitions in David (Peter Sarsgaard), a fellow music lover who takes what at first appears to be an innocent interest in her. Of course, from his age – he's clearly well into his thirties – we know immediately that this interest is not going to remain wholly innocent for long. But with a remarkable ability to charm her parents and access to money that he certainly knows how to enjoy, it's not long before he's whisking her away, inducting her into London's glamorous cultural scene.

Jenny is all too willing to go along for the ride too. She loves the attention he bestows upon her and thrives in a world where art is actually bought and appreciated and French can be spoken just for the hell of it. But this is no Pygmalion-style male fantasy. As much as Jenny is being seduced by what David represents, she's not totally naïve.

She has firm ideas about what she wants from life, and firm ideas about sex also. What the film is good at is showing without condescension, however, is that she doesn't yet have the wisdom to realise that things might not be all they seem.

She may not be a foolish little schoolgirl, but nor does she have the smarts the come from actual experience to have everything figured out.

When she rejects the advice of one of her teachers, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), who can see where things are heading and is fearful that her star pupil is throwing her future away, Jenny's observation that Miss Stubbs doesn't exactly seem like a good advert for devoting one's life to hitting the books seems perfectly legitimate – until revelations in her relationship with David expose her own prejudices for what they are.

Mulligan is fantastic here, demonstrating genuine star quality, as Jenny transforms from a brashly confident teen to self-aware adult over the course of 90 minutes. She's ably supported by Sarsgaard, who adds enough shading to David to make what we know will turn out to be reprehensible behaviour seem believably human.

Throughout the film, Sarsgaard subtly makes us party to the little cracks and fissures in David's too-good-to-be-true life, from the cagey way he refuses to discuss his occupation with Jenny to way he masks his surprising lack of prowess in the bedroom with jokes and horseplay.

But the film is not just about their relationship. As its initial, glamorous rush is supplanted by tawdriness, the film smartly places it within the wider historical context of British society on the cusp of major social upheaval. The film shows how issues of racial, gender and religious inequality were just beginning to chip away at the starchy, drab, respectable façade of post-war Britain.

Which isn't to say that the film descends into a social-realist treatise on the state of the nation. Rather, it merely acknowledges the good job Scherfig and Hornby have done in exploiting the designed-for-mass-appeal style of the film to reflect the way in which calm, seductive exteriors often mask hidden truths.

Like I said, sometimes films can be deceptive. And sometimes they're all the better for it.