Ok, so it’s not a new release but I just had to post about ‘An Education’, after yesterday over lunch in the studio, while flicking through the usual stack of magazines, I discovered that the Mawi team had all fallen completely in love with this film, and its heroine- the ‘girl crush’ worthy Carey Mulligan. Three cheers on your BAFTA Carey!

For those who haven’t seen it, the film tells the true story of Lynn Barber- an almost remarkably ordinary school girl (called Jenny in the film) from Twickenham whose life is momentarily transformed when she (and less literally her parents) are seduced by a much older and seemingly impossibly glamorous man.

The title plays on the fact that her former desire to receive  ’An Education’ in the formal and conventional setting of Oxford is disrupted by the apparent ‘education’ her new acquaintance and his fast set offers in opera, art, auctions, music, fashion, Paris and general sophistication.

It’s a film that perfectly captures the conflict between two ‘value’ systems that vie for the claim over an 18 year old girl who is simultaneously child-like when she giggles with her hormone-ridden, awkward friends; naturally poised when dressed up like a doll by a ditsy clothes horse (played hysterically by the infact Oxford-educated Rosamund Pike), and snobby towards her square, suburban parents in a way that adds another, and at times uncomfortable, edge to the narrative.

It is a wonderful study of late adolescence not as something hysterical and angst-ridden but as a point at which people teeter onto their own feet and make tentative grow- up steps away from everything that previously seemed concrete, only to cyclically collapse back into that growing-up place when not everything is quite as liberating as it seems.

And the moments of Jenny’s retreat offer real poignancy. I don’t want to give too much away, but there was one scene when the simple gesture of a cup of tea and biscuits left outside Jenny’s bedroom door was enough to make tears come rolling down my cheeks.

I couldn’t resist reading Lynn Barber’s memoirs afterwards. Now a respected journalist, known for her incisive interviews, the plot of ‘An Education’ makes up just one chapter of her honest and revealing memoirs. I would recommend you read them after the film.