An Education

An Education follows Jenny, a clever sixteen year old schoolgirl in early 1960s suburban London, whose life is pointed firmly toward Oxford. When David, a charming and much older man, draws her into a world of concerts, auction houses and weekends away, she begins to weigh her studies against the glamour he offers, before learning who he really is.

Critics received the film as the arrival of Carey Mulligan, whose poised central performance carried the picture and earned an Academy Award nomination. They also credited Nick Hornby's screenplay, adapted from Lynn Barber's memoir, for its wit and its unsentimental attention to class, ambition and the limits placed on bright young women of the period.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film sets out the workings of adolescent idealisation with unusual clarity: the older figure who flatters, the seduction that shades into disillusion, and the tension between desire and the slow work of formation. Jenny's wish to be chosen, and her reckoning with what she overlooked, offer rich material for thinking about development and self deception.