Where Viewed: On DVD, at home.
Experience with Film: first time viewing
Writer: Nick Hornby
Director: Lone Scherfig
Principal Actors: Carey Mulligan, Peter Saarsgaard
A film about a nearly-disastrous affair that is pleasant to watch–tastefully upholstered with top notch actors, a nostalgic soundtrack, and well-appointed production design. Throughout the film, I had a strong urge to lie on the floor smoking cigarettes and listening to French songstresses on a battered turntable. And smoke more cigarettes. But it’s about the education of Jenny, the precociously cultured main character, as she sheds her staid middle-class British adolescence for a daring tryst with an older man flush with cash, brio, and good taste, but ultimately poor in morals. Will she cling to her old life, her school, her lame town? Of course not. Jennie torches the bridges to her past life, dismisses all the females she knows as sad and boring fossils, and leaps into her new exciting life. It fails immediately. She knew her older man was a hustler, a liar, a thief, but it’s revealed that he’s already married. In this film, an irrevocable betrayal. This is the ultimate crisis of the film: she’s caught between the collapsed dream of her future and the smoldering wreckage of her past. She’s dismissed one education (school, university, scholarly life) for another (culture, excitement, fancy things) and ends up with neither. What happens next? Disappointingly, a montage and voiceover narration that assures the audience that, having studied hard, she makes it into Oxford and meets a normal boy. She almost entirely disowns the particular education (culture, excitement, fancy things) she spends the film pursuing. A burble of drama in a boring life resumed. We have returned to the status quo and all is well.
Hooray? Harrumph.
FADE OUT 