An Education

United Kingdom, United States

2009

95 Min

Color

2.35:1

English, French

Currently 3.4/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

PROD Finola Dwyer, Amanda Posey

CAST Carey Mulligan, Peter Sarsgaard, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Olivia Williams, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike, Emma Thompson, Sally Hawkins

MUSIC Paul Englishby

Toronto (Special Presentation), Telluride (The 'Show'), London (Gala), São Paulo, !F Istanbul (Hit Films)

Synopsis

In the early 1960’s, sixteen year old Jenny Mellor lives with her parents in the London suburb of Twickenham. On her father’s wishes, everything that Jenny does is in the sole pursuit of being accepted into Oxford, as he wants her to have a better life than he. Jenny is bright, pretty, hard working but also naturally gifted. The only problems her father may perceive in her life is her issue with learning Latin, and her dating a boy named Graham, who is nice but socially awkward. Jenny’s life changes after she meets David Goldman, a man over twice her age. David goes out of his way to show Jenny and her family that his interest in her is not improper and that he wants solely to expose her to cultural activities which she enjoys. Jenny quickly gets accustomed to the life to which David and his constant companions, Danny and Helen, have shown her, and Jenny and David’s relationship does move into becoming a romantic one… –IMDb

Director

Lone Scherfig

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig is part of the Dogme 95 film movement, which espouses a form of cinéma vérité that eschews special effects and glitzy treatment of its subjects. Cameras are handheld; films are shot on location with no extraneous props or atmospheric music. This is all part of the group’s renowned, so-called “Vow of Chastity.”
Employing the principles of Dogme 95, Scherfig made Italian for Beginners in 2001. The film won the Silver Bear juried prize at the Berlin Film Festival, and has enjoyed accolades from audiences in Europe and America, where the director made a special version minus the Danish inside jokes. The romantic comedy — a new direction for the normally serious Dogme 95 — centers around a group of disparate people in Copenhagen, who meet to learn the Italian language. Relationships form; romances blossom; the story unfolds with ever increasing complications and convolutions, hinting at the complexities of love. The love angle may reflect a female sensibility, something that Scherfig brings to the otherwise all-male Dogme 95 group, who invited her to join them. She has been quoted as saying that since she has made soap operas for television, she knew how to avoid crossing that line between tragi-comic and maudlin when writing the script for the film. Indeed, while the movie touches upon many serious subjects such as loss through suicide and divorce, it has a feel-good, light quality about it.
Italian for Beginners, shot on a budget of less than a million dollars using local settings, has brought the former Danish Film School teacher recognition from prestigious film festivals and Hollywood alike. That positive regard eluded her while working on several previous feature films, including On Our Own, as well as some forgettable sitcoms, such as Taxa, for Danish television.
Since the success of Italian for Beginners in America, Hollywood has beckoned. So far, Scherfig has resisted Tinsel Town’s siren call, preferring her quiet life and garden by the sea in Denmark with her husband and daughter. —allmovie guide

read less

Wall

Displaying 4 of 90 wall posts.

see all

Igor Ramos

11May13

Very decent movie. Nothing extraordinary or memorable about it, but Mulligan does deliver a very strong performance, even if her character's actions may seem, at times, a bit forced or implausible. This is the kind of movie you would want to show to your younger sister, if you have one.