An Education (2009)

This is my first movie review and I will be trying to write this without looking at imdb or rottentomatoes or even wikipedia for that matter so you’ll have to forgive me if my review is far fetched and distorts the movie in terms of facts.

Directed by Lone Scherfig, An Education is a movie about the growing up of Jenny, played by Carey Mulligan. The movie is a fluid tale set in 1970s England. The cinematography of the movie is perfect. It does not overwhelm the movie but it does create the perfect setting for the movie and is the clear winner in the movie, aside from Carey Mulligan that is. Through Jenny, the audience is exposed to the primary theme of the movie; the need for education and its relevance in a society which is very strongly influenced by other elements as well.

Jenny is a high-school girl aspiring to make it to Oxford. Pushed on by an overbearing father who leaves no stone unturned in his ambition for his daughter, Jenny dwells in her “shell” until she meets David, who shows her the high life. His con business notwithstanding, Jenny decides to marry him and abandon her education for it only to be left stranded when she realizes that he is a serial adulterer. She proceeds to work again towards her original goal and succeeds to this end.

The performance of Alfred Molina as the father is spot on and all the other characters seem to pale in comparison to both Jenny and her father.

The screenplay of the movie is also hard to criticize and Jenny’s in particular stand out such as her response to Ms. Stubbs where she says, “I feel very old but not very wise”. The dialogue between Mrs. Walters, the headmistress, and Jenny where they the latter expresses her view on education put forth the theme of the movie very lucidly.

I found that the movie lacked in terms of editing. It could have been much sharper at many places. Though the movie is set at a relatively convenient pace, the scenes were unnecessarily long at times and this was the only serious fault that I found with the movie.

This movie has the much more convenient debate of achieving success through education vis-à-vis con, I feel that it could have been a little less judgmental of the latter in terms of the categorical rejection of it. The fact that the story showed Jenny to have achieved success through the tried and tested methods of hard work, though reassuring to the faithful, is a criticism of out of the box approaches.

The movie also raises the theme of our perceptions of what bourgeois means to us and how quickly it can transcend into uncouth. David’s dialogue with Jenny turns the tables on his high society character when he criticizes her for being too bourgeois.

All in all, the movie is definitely worth a watch for some good performances and more than good background score and cinematography.

My rating – 8/10

Love?

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.

-Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is what Shakespeare had to say on the topic of lovers.

It’s funny how the virtues of ubiquity, omnipresence, omnipotence, world turningness and so much more is attributed to love and yet when it comes to putting it into words, all we’ve reached thus far is that it is what happens when a couple of pheromones, dopamine and oxytocin form a potent enough amalgamation to trigger the pleasure center of the brain. The other more widely accepted understanding of love is that it is the delirious euphoria that brings with it tornadoes and typhoons capable of ravaging entire villages and gentle breezes that can barely support a feather. But neither the winds nor the chemicals are of any help to the millions of people out there who weather the tribulations of relationships and “love”

Be it the frenzies of lust that devour young couples or the pails of silence that fill the hearts of the more wizened, love manifests itself in many ways. How then, are two mortals meant to realize if what they feel is an entwinement of their souls that outlasts the sun and the stars or the ephemeral fling of a moth to a fire.

And then there are the doubts. “What is love?” “Will this love last?” “Has the love faded out?” To answer all this, the answer to one question suffices.

“Am I in love?”. The answer can come from something as innocuous as “Radha Kaise Na Jale” from Lagaan . Love is when all the songs make sense.