An Education (Scherfig, 2009)
To try and make this newsletter a little less Aotea-centric, I’m experimenting with a change of format.
From this week, the details of where a film or series is streaming/renting can be found near the bottom of the email and also includes details for Australia, US and UK.
Today, though, I was specifically looking for something that local audiences could watch for free and was delighted to see that TVNZ+ has Lone Scherfig’s An Education – the film that made Carey Mulligan a star.
Fourteen years ago this week, I wrote:
Twickenham in 1961 might well have been the most boring place on Earth. The 60s haven’t started yet (according to Philip Larkin the decade wouldn’t start until 1963 “between the end of the Chatterley Ban/and The Beatles first LP”) but the train was already on the tracks and could be heard approaching from a distance if you listened closely enough. Middle-class teenager Jenny is studying hard for Oxford but longing for something else – freedom and French cigarettes, love and liberation.
In Lone Scherfig’s An Education (from a script by Nick Hornby; adapted from Lynn Barber’s memoir), Jenny is luminously portrayed by newcomer Carey Mulligan (so adorable that if she’s ever in a film with Juno’s Ellen Page we’ll have to recalibrate the cuteness scale to accommodate them both) and she gets a hint of a way out of suburban English drudgery when she meets cool businessman David (Peter Sarsgaard) and he whisks her off her feet, to the West End and to Paris.
When her teachers (Olivia Williams and Emma Thompson) aren’t able to sell a vision of the future that can compete with her dreams, Jenny finds that the grown-up world is even harder to read than the Latin homework she tries to leave behind.
I also neglected to confirm that it’s really, really good.
That 2009 review in the Capital Times also featured “a kind of Rocky for the UFC crowd”, Fighting starring Channing Tatum and featuring one of my favourite – and prescient – lines in nearly 20 years of reviewing:
“Tatum has the potential to be a Steve McQueen for the generation whose underpants are falling out of the top of their trousers but that’s all it is at the moment – potential.”
Where can I find An Education?
NZ Digital: You can stream it on TVNZ+ or rent it from Apple
Aus Digital: Rental or purchase only (unless your library has curated it for their Beamafilm selection).
USA Digital: Streaming on Hulu or a rental from most outlets
UK Digital: You can stream it on Disney+ or rent it from the usual suspects
Obviously, these details can shift around a bit as titles move between streamers. No guarantees of accuracy after today.
Further reading
The Terror-Fi Film Festival kicks off in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch today and I previewed three of the 14 titles for the RNZ website.
And yesterday at RNZ I posted another entry in my slow survey of the Sight & Sound Top 50 films of all time: Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.
