This is the second gorgeously-shot, magnificently-acted movie about an English girl who falls in love with a mysterious, charming man but ends up spending most of the last half weeping that I’ve seen in a month. But if Bright Star is a more clearly idiosyncratic film, following its own weird muse down odd pathways — does Jane Campion do any other kind? — An Education seemed to me, despite the occasional descent into glib Hornbyishness, more truthful about the world. Probably this is because it’s impossible in the twenty-first century to take the conventions and postures of a Romantic poet entirely seriously; too much water has flowed under too many well-trod bridges for Keats to ever be anything but luminous and fey and kind of a pill. In order to break through the stagy familiarity of underexposed BBC productions and rote biopics, Campion has to create an entirely different world, one with only passing resemblance to our own or any other that’s ever been on screen. It’s a wonderful vision, but it doesn’t engage with a lot of recognizable emotion. An Education engages in a more knowing kind of distancing: its world is firmly the world of movies, no unbeautiful people allowed, and its repeated visual references to 60s film and a London just on the trembling edge of Swinging (you feel like Please Please Me will be released just after the credits roll) only encourage the idea that this is the kind of thing we’ve seen before, only thanks to the exemplary performances and a lot of terrific between-beats business, it’s this story and not another. It’s a world we know — we are far more comfortable interpreting people who smoke and read Camus and think of jazz as impossibly sophisticated than people who explain themselves through lyrical verse and catch cold by sitting on top of carriages — which means that the movie has to work much less hard to convince us. (By us I of course mean me.) Even if it’s a patently false world, it’s one we partially inhabit; half the world we live in and learn from (at least) is similarly contrived. And as an English student and probable future teacher, I can’t not love a movie which contains a Rockyesque inspirational montage of someone reading a lot of books. Seriously. Anyway, if you’re going to see An Education, I cannot recommend enough listening to Nina Simone’s album I Put A Spell On You on the drive home. So fucking good.

This is the second gorgeously-shot, magnificently-acted movie about an English girl who falls in love with a mysterious, charming man but ends up spending most of the last half weeping that I’ve seen in a month.

But if Bright Star is a more clearly idiosyncratic film, following its own weird muse down odd pathways — does Jane Campion do any other kind? — An Education seemed to me, despite the occasional descent into glib Hornbyishness, more truthful about the world. Probably this is because it’s impossible in the twenty-first century to take the conventions and postures of a Romantic poet entirely seriously; too much water has flowed under too many well-trod bridges for Keats to ever be anything but luminous and fey and kind of a pill. In order to break through the stagy familiarity of underexposed BBC productions and rote biopics, Campion has to create an entirely different world, one with only passing resemblance to our own or any other that’s ever been on screen. It’s a wonderful vision, but it doesn’t engage with a lot of recognizable emotion.

An Education engages in a more knowing kind of distancing: its world is firmly the world of movies, no unbeautiful people allowed, and its repeated visual references to 60s film and a London just on the trembling edge of Swinging (you feel like Please Please Me will be released just after the credits roll) only encourage the idea that this is the kind of thing we’ve seen before, only thanks to the exemplary performances and a lot of terrific between-beats business, it’s this story and not another. It’s a world we know — we are far more comfortable interpreting people who smoke and read Camus and think of jazz as impossibly sophisticated than people who explain themselves through lyrical verse and catch cold by sitting on top of carriages — which means that the movie has to work much less hard to convince us. (By us I of course mean me.) Even if it’s a patently false world, it’s one we partially inhabit; half the world we live in and learn from (at least) is similarly contrived.

And as an English student and probable future teacher, I can’t not love a movie which contains a Rockyesque inspirational montage of someone reading a lot of books. Seriously.

Anyway, if you’re going to see An Education, I cannot recommend enough listening to Nina Simone’s album I Put A Spell On You on the drive home. So fucking good.

Notes

  1. aceterrier posted this