Dir. Lone Scherfig, UK, 2009, 100 mins
Cast: Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina,
Review by Carol Allen
There are times after seeing yet another pointless junk movie, when a film critic might be forgiven for thinking that there must be better ways of spending one’s time than reviewing films. Then along comes an almost perfect movie like this one and one can’t wait to share it with other people. Set in an academic girls’ grammar school in 1961, it’s the story of how Jenny (Mulligan), a bright and spirited 16 year old, is seduced from her school books by David (Sarsgaard), an apparently worldly older man. Writer Nick Hornby has based it on a newspaper article by journalist Lynn Barber about an experience she had, when she was a pupil at a classy girls’ school in Twickenham in the very early sixties. Hornby’s beautifully written screenplay and Scherfig’s direction perfectly capture not only the look but the social attitudes of suburban England just before the “swinging sixties” kicked in.
This is particularly true of Molina’s performance as Jenny’s loving but dominating dad with his obsession with “getting on” in life and his restricted experience of the world, such as his bafflement when faced with a starter in a restaurant and his distrust of all things French. Scherfig, the only woman member of the Scandinavian Dogme 95 movement of a few years back, who directed the admirably lucid “Italian for Beginners” under their stringent rules of simplicity, demonstrates once again not only her great sensitivity with actors but also her talent for getting on with the job of telling a story rather than cluttering the screen up with fancy effects and camera angles. Mulligan is obviously a talent to watch. She totally convinces as the would be sophisticated schoolgirl greedily absorbing the world into which David introduces her. Even her habit of pretentiously slipping bits of French into her conversation is endearing. Saarsgaard as David is both boyishly charming and seductive. We cannot help but like him, even as we start to suspect there’s something fishy going on. There’s a suggestion that he’s a Rachman style landlord in Notting Hill, he and his friend Danny are up to some pretty dodgy scams and, with Jenny’s collusion, he brazenly lies to and manipulates her parents. Sarsgaard also does a convincing English accent.
There’s good support from Dominic Cooper as Danny, Rosalind Pyke, delightfully funny as Danny’s intellectually dumb but streetwise girlfriend, and a strong cameo from Emma Thompson as the school’s strict and anti-semitic headmistress – David is Jewish, at a time when anti-semitism was in many strata of society still regarded as acceptable. Olivia Williams contributes a likeable performance as Jenny’s devoted English teacher, keen to encourage her pupil’s talent but also encapsulating the then limited career opportunities for a young woman with a good university degree in her intended to be encouraging remark – “It doesn’t have to be teaching. There’s also the civil service”.
The only time the film gets the period detail wrong is in a reference to “getting good grades”. In those days it was “getting good marks”. Even though this is very much a period piece and young people seem to launch themselves into the adult world at a much younger age these days, there are still many things about Jenny’s story with which today’s teenagers will identify. It’s a film about growing up, which is always scary, exciting and full of choices and challenges, whatever period of time you grow up in.
