It’s a great relief that Suffragette isn’t a showy, glamorized, romantic period piece meant to wow us with its pretty locales and intricate costume design. The British suffragettes of the early 20th century deserve a more honest, grounded depiction than that, and that’s what director Sarah Gavron and writer Abi Morgan deliver. Their version of the suffragette movement is violent, thrilling and dirty. These women put everything on the line in the name of justice and equality, shattering windows and blowing up mailboxes at the risk of losing their jobs and families. Women may have won the right to vote here and in Britain a long time ago, but the tragedy is that many of the injustices the suffragettes rallied against in the past still stand strong today.

We see the movement through the eyes of Maud (Carey Mulligan), a working woman with a husband, Sonny (Ben Wishaw), and a son, George (Adam Michael Dodd). Maud’s not taken from the history books—she’s a composite of Morgan and Gavron’s research on suffragettes of the time, particularly those in the middle class. At the story’s outset she exists outside the suffragette circle, accepting of her lot working at a musty laundry where she’s sexually abused by her boss. Her inner activist is ignited when she sees suffragettes carrying out minor acts of vandalism all around East London in their fight for equal voting rights.

Almost by accident, Maud is recruited by her co-worker Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and is further inspired by Edith Ellyn (Helena Bonham Carter), a suffragist leader who holds secret meetings in the pharmacy she runs. Leading the larger suffragist charge as figurehead is Emmeline Pankhurst (Meryl Streep), who gives Maud a jumpstart of empowerment and inspiration (we see her only briefly, but Streep knows how to make her minutes count). The women may not have a voice in parliament, but they’ve got bravery and conviction to spare.

As she gets caught up in suffragist activities, Maud begins to realize the true scale of her sacrifice for the movement. She’s thrown in jail (where she’s force-fed—a gruesome scene) and villainized by most of her community, and Sonny hasn’t the patience or understanding to tolerate her new life’s mission. He kicks her out of their tiny flat and forbids her from seeing George, leaving her fellow female foot soldiers as her only allies.

Mulligan has a gift that allows her to embody strength and delicateness at the same time, and few roles would be better served by her talents than that of Maud. Heartrending are the scenes in which Maud sneaks George away from school to spend a few precious hours of quality time; you can see joy and anguish in equal parts on Mulligan’s face as Maud savors her time with her son. Also great are Mulligan’s scenes with Brendan Gleeson, who plays a detectie heading up a suffragette surveillance operation. He’s the only almost-sympathetic figure on the oppressor’s side of the story (he empathizes with the suffragettes but ultimately does nothing to help them), though the film never ham-fistedly villainizes the men in the story. Other filmmakers might have made the story about some sort of ethical awakening on the men’s side, but Gavron and Morgan are more tasteful than that; their story is about the women’s fight for justice, period.

There’s no effort to show off the film’s elaborate production design in a Hollywood-y way by Gavron, and that’s one of the film’s strengths. Every bit of East London we see looks detailed and painstakingly designed, but the characters are always the focus, which results in a more immersive period experience. This is the first movie ever to be allowed to film at the UK’s Houses of Parliament, and the filmmakers don’t squandor the opportunity by giving the location center stage. It’s the sign of a film made with dignity and care.

The thing working against Suffragette is that it’s not quite as rousing as you’d think it would be. It’s admirable in the way it respects the dark days these heroes endured to pave the way for future generations, but there’s something about the tone and pace of the movie that lacks an overarching sense of force and activist aggression, something a movie so unenamored with style could have done better with. On the other hand, I’ll take a melancholic but respectful historical drama over a glitzy, Oscar-bait-y one any day.

Suffragette, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Sarah Gavron, takes a sobering look at gender inequality through the eyes of the trailblazing suffragettes of early-20th-century Britain. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a fictional composite of several women and experiences of the time. A working woman, wife and mother, Maud gets swept up by the suffragette movement, changing her life forever as she becomes a militant activist for women’s rights. Evading the authorities in their fight for equality, the suffragettes’ crusade puts a strain on their home lives, with the future of Maud’s family hanging in the balance as she’s scorned by her disapproving husband.

In a roundtable interview we spoke to Gavron and Morgan about Suffragette, which also stars Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, Grace Stottor, Romola Garai, Meryl Streep, Ben Wishaw, and Brendan Gleeson. The film opens today in select cities and expands wide on November 20th.

What inspired the project?
Sarah: It was a long genesis for me. I wanted to do it for about ten years. I grew up with a mother who became a local politician. I watched her agency in a very male world. We haven’t learned about suffragettes in school. We just knew the very sanitized Mary Poppins version like everybody did. It’s not a widely known story. There was a really good TV series called Shoulder To Shoulder that made an impact. So, people were discussing it, but there wasn’t a big screen version of it. It seemed extraordinary and such a timely story, overdue in terms of telling the story. But also, it seemed to resonate with the world we live in in so many ways. The two producers, Faye Ward and Alison Owen—it occurred to them at the same time. They had a conversation about doing a film about this, and it made sense for us to talk to Abi because she was the writer who had worked on Brick Lane.

Abi: From my point of view it was very exciting because I had done biopics before, but this felt like a different way of looking at a biopic. We started to focus in and think, “Okay, we could do ‘The Extraordinary Life of Miss Pankhurst’ or Emily Wilding Davison.” But those women will have at one point have a film about their lives. I hope they do. But when we started to hone in on the lives of the working women, there were surprising details everywhere we looked. The police surveillance records, which were only opened in 2003, where you’d see a tiny bit of an interview. Or you would read a testimonial of a woman who had been taken when she took the deputations to the House of Parliament. These women are really interesting because the jeopardy on their lives is so profound. So many of these women were being appallingly treated at work. Their working conditions were just chronic. They tried to manage having working lives and children and they didn’t have a wealthy husband or family wealth. They were fighting for equal pay and dealing with sexual violence. There were so many issues they were dealing with, and they were so profound and so 21st-century.

I started to think, what if we took a woman who was outside of that, in a place of passivity, who didn’t realize just how downtrodden and difficult her life was. And then, through engagement with the movement, moves towards militant activism and change, realizing it’s the ordinary women who change history. Then we though, that might be a story for us all. I think that was when we started to feel like it could be a proper movie.

Talk about Maud. She’s a composite of many women.
Abi: Originally, she was a character I put in the house of Alice Houghton, played by Romola Garai. I had this idea that the lady upstairs was going to fall in love with the maid. Through that, they would emancipate each other. But when I started doing more research and we started looking at the world of the laundries in East London, you started to look at the extraordinary working conditions and the ailments and the injuries these women had. There seemed to be a contradiction from the photos you would see of these laundries, which actually looked quite clean and civilized. It’s like, okay, this is interesting. Then, within that, you realize some of the women in these places joined the movement. When they were in incarceration, they couldn’t pay their bail. They lost their jobs and sometimes their children. That story started to have a real sense of jeopardy.

Sarah: Maud was drawn from these working women. Many of them didn’t write their own stories, but there were some who wrote their own stories, or other people wrote their stories, or you could piece together their lives from police records. Hannah Mitchell was a working woman, Annie Barnes, Annie Kenney—you could find Mauds in the research. It was about being liberated from the biopic.

Abi: It allowed us to kind of create this ensemble of women, so you could find the Edith Ellyns who had perhaps been educated, but at that time weren’t able to pick up their degrees. [They would] marry into relationships where they were really the brains of the relationship and would have entitlement to a business. Someone like Violet had a very abusive relationship, which you couldn’t talk about. It might be talked about when noticing someone’s bruises, but there was no refuge, nowhere for these women to go. I worked on an adaptation of Nelly Ternan’s life, who was the lover of Charles Dickens. I’d already looked at Victorian East London 40-50 years earlier, and to look back at 1912 and realize that so many of these issues that Charles Dickens was drawing upon are still affecting women today, I thought, this is interesting.

How important was it that the protagonist be the total package—be married, be a mother, be someone who has essentially accepted her lot in life and only gradually begins to see that it doesn’t have to be her lot in life?
Abi: I think those are the strains that feel very familiar to us all. I was trying to create a character who was identifiable. I don’t think you have to be a woman who is married. The film is about empowering women to say, globally, there are these huge inequalities we deal with. For Maud, we wanted to create a woman who was not even yet engaged with how unhappy she was. This is a woman who’s been institutionalized from an early age. She’s been abused by her employer, her mother was most likely abused before her. Maud has a scar on her arm, and the idea was that she was there when her mother was burned to death at the laundry. You’re meant to realize this woman has a huge legacy that she has just suppressed and suppressed. Engagement with a group of women who say, “We’re equal. You no longer have to deal with these conditions. Your life can change,” that’s the thing that activates her. It was very important that we created all of those pressures women of today have. They have to bring in money, raise their children, deal with sexual violence or sexual intimidation. They have to find their voice, and the whole point of the film is trying to give these voiceless women a voice.

Sarah: By looking at a marriage at the center of it, we were able to explore the politics of the marriage in terms of the power balance and the parental rights issue and the lack of economic power within a marriage.

It also raises the stakes so much higher.
Abi: Absolutely. And that’s a good point. The film couldn’t just work [politically]. It had to work as a piece of genuine human drama. We were trying to consecrate that jeopardy. That’s something Sarah worked really hard on.

Brendan Gleeson’s character is interesting. I think his conversations with Maud are important.
Sarah: The police archives opened up in 2003 and revealed this undercover surveillance observation, which was so extraordinary because it showed the level of threat the government perceived these women posed. They took this cutting-edge technology to the streets, and it all seemed so intriguing. There are these two Irish policemen we honed in on, and Abi drew on them for Brendan Gleeson’s character. What was exciting was that he was a character who wasn’t single-faceted. He changed and had many dimensions. He was upholding the law, but the very act of surveying those women meant that he was seeing them up-close and understanding their dilemma, actually.

Abi: In fact, that was what was so great about working on this film together. It was actually Sarah who found those two detectives. That’s amazing. We’d be working on a police officer and he wouldn’t feel fully rounded, so Sarah would go and research. I’d written it as an Irish character, but when Brendan came onboard it really made sense. He had his own history he was bringing to the table. So many of the techniques used on these women went on to be used in Northern Ireland. There were so many layers to that journey of making him, and it really is about the fusion of a great actor who brings his own baggage to the table and a director who’s constantly going, “Let’s shape, let’s shape, let’s shape.”

When I was watching the movie I thought about the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.
Abi: It was more about the metaphor. These women wash and clean and restore and get rid of the dirt and stains of London, starching men’s collars. They send them out clean again only for them to come back dirty. It was this relentless cycle these women were in, always trying to maintain order, and yet there was this underlying chaos. You’re always looking for a visual metaphor to somehow have a relationship with the themes of the film. I think the laundry was really important.

The costumes and locations are extraordinary, but the film doesn’t seem concerned with showing them off like other period movies are.
Sarah: We did want to embed it in the period and make it feel very real. We chose a lot of real locations and didn’t do set builds whenever possible. We closed off a central London street for that opening sequence where they smash windows in Central London. We got access to the House of Parliament, which was exciting because it was a place no film crew was ever allowed to film in. We petitioned like suffragettes and they agreed. [laughs] Just to be in that place where history had happened felt like a marker of how far we had come. But also, as you say, we didn’t want to make the locations a character or foreground them. We wanted you to follow the characters through their world, glimpsing life as they did. We created a 360 degree world so we could capture their actions instead of staging it.

What kind of homework did you give the cast?
Sarah: They’d never had so much homework in their lives! [laughs] We gave them these packets. We got the whole team assembled for weeks and were feeding them stuff from the minute they committed. We fed them books and background and took them to laundries and police cells—whatever we could do to really bring the world to life for them. We created these research packages for each aspect of [the story], and that was great. We had Carey on for months and had a three-week rehearsal period.

Abi: What’s great is that the Olive Schreiner quote we used at the end of the movie is from her book Dreams In A Desert, and the book became very important to Carey. There were a few scenes we had to end the movie, and we suddenly realized we needed something that truly symbolized the fact that the fight goes on and that it’ll be the next generation they’ll pass it on to. She found that quote. We wrote a scene where Emily Wilding Davison gives her the book. That’s what was great—she could really go in and participate in that way.

It feels like it’s the right time for this film to come out.
Sarah: We hope so. When we were developing it, it strangely felt like it was becoming more timely, or at least the world was becoming more receptive to these themes and ideas. Abi honed in on this period that felt particularly resonant, so there was there was the police surveillance operation, which echoed all the issues around surveillance. Violence and protest and this journey towards activism, custodial rights, sexual violence. We were also hearing from more women around the world, probably because the digital world was allowing those women to be heard. It seemed the time to tell it. Feminism has also suddenly become less of a dirty word. Hopefully not a dirty word. [laughs]

The 38th annual Mill Valley Film Festival was a memorable 10-day celebration indeed. A few excellent films emerged as sure-fire Oscar contenders, like Tom McCarthy’s newsroom slow-burner Spotlight, Cary Joji Fukunaga‘s Netflix powerhouse Beasts of No Nation, László Nemes’ heartstopping Son of Saul, and Kent Jones’ incisive documentary Hitchcock/Truffaut.

Actors further cemented their cases for awards consideration as well: Michael Keaton again went toe-to-toe with last year’s Best Actor Oscar-winner, Eddie Redmayne, as their two films, Spotlight and The Danish Girl, took center stage on opening night; Brie Larson gives the best performance of her career in Lenny Abrahamson’s Room; and Sir Ian McKellen charmed festival-goers for two days, reminding us of his heartfelt, unforgettable turn as the aging Mr. Holmes.

Some under-the-radar films made lasting impressions as well, like Mitchell Lichtenstein’s gothic ghost story Angelica and Gunnar Vikene’s Nordic dark comedy Here Is Harold (my personal favorite of the festival).

My MVFF experience ended off as strong as it started, with two very different but equally spellbinding foreign features and yet another film that may be picking up a few golden statues come February.

Fight (And Burn Stuff) For the Right

With feminism becoming less and less of a dirty word as women and feminist allies become more and more galvanized around the fight for gender equality, Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette looks back to the early feminists who sacrificed home and health to demand their right to vote in early 20th-century England. Carey Mulligan stars as Maud, a working-class wife and mother who gets swept up by the British suffragette movement, participating in explosive acts of protest alongside her fellow footsoldiers (played by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Anne-Marie Duff, and Meryl Streep). The cost of Maud’s actions are steep, however; her husband (Ben Wishaw) refuses to abide her newfound passion for activism, kicking Maud out of their home, away from their son. Screenwriter Abi Morgan’s story is as rousing as you’d expect for such inherently inspirational subject matter, but the film’s real strength is in its humility and dignity; it’s a period piece brimming with stunning locations (it was the first production allowed to be shot in the British Houses of Parliament since the ’50s) and elaborate costumes, but never lets the production design take precedence over the characters’ plight unlike other, showier period pieces. Mulligan is typically wonderful though she doesn’t reach the emotional depth of some of her greater performances. Still, it’s a fine film all involved are surely proud to have been a part of.

Amazon Enlightenment

The most sublime, heart-achingly beautiful thing I saw at MVFF was an Amazonian upriver tale called Embrace of the Serpent, by Colombian director Ciro Guerra. It’s a magical, almost religious experience when a film breaks free completely from modern cinema norms and puts you in a state of mind you’ve never known, and that’s what Guerra does here. Shot on Super 35 black and white, the film follows two white scientists (Jan Bijvoet and Brionne Davis) as they scour the Amazon for a rare healing plant, their journeys separated by decades (one’s set in the early 1900s, the other 40 years later). The foreigners share a common guide, Amazonian shaman Karamakate (Nilbio Torres and Antonio Bolivar). The story is a dirge-like lament on the soul-sucking effect colonization has had on the once pure Amazonian culture. Otherworldly and yet bound to the earth and all her natural glory, Embrace of the Serpent is as can’t-miss as they come.

Sin and Splendor

Inside a cozy little house lives a family fractured by sexual awakening, paranoia, and depravity in Tali Shalom-Ezer‘s bone-chilling Princess. A most unsettling topic—child molestation—is explored delicately and artfully by the Israeli writer-director, whose story gently unfolds in a series of quietly intoxicating, increasingly unsettling glimpses of domestic implosion. The protagonist is Adar (Shira Haas), a bright 12-year-old who lives with her mom, Alma (Keren Mor), and her mom’s boyfriend, Michael (Ori Pfeffer). Adar and Michael have fun horsing around at home while mom goes off to work, but Michael’s playing grows inappropriate before long (he starts calling her “little prince”). Adar’s new friend, a boy named Alan (Adar Zohar-Hanetz), bears a staggering resemblance to her, and when he’s invited to stay with the family for a while, he becomes the new object of Michael’s affections. Sumptuously-lit and fluidly edited, the film’s presentation is lovely, which is a nice counter-balance to the difficult subject matter. Like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Princess creates a beautiful sense of dreamlike disorientation and mirror-image poetry that arthouse lovers will treasure.

Following The Imitation Game last year and Captain Phillips in 2013, Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette has set its European premiere date for opening night of the 59th BFI London Film Festival. A story of women fighting for women’s rights at the end of the 19th century, the feminist drama will debut on Wednesday, October 7th at the Odeon Leicester Square with simultaneous screenings taking place throughout the UK. With Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter as well as Meryl Streep in main roles, Suffragette is among the most highly anticipated films slated to come out in 2015.

Along with the news of its BFI London Film Fest premiere date, Suffragette has revealed two new look slightly different looks into surprisingly explosive upcoming film. Mulligan plays Maud, a working wife and mother who gets swept up by the foot soldiers of a growing feminist movement. Bonham Carter and Streep play fellow members of the movement, while villainous authority figure Brendan Gleeson seeks to dismantle their organization. Fancy period costumes are abound. The two newly released trailers have overlap, though the UK trailer is less ham-fisted in its unveiling of information.

Suffragette is scheduled to be released in New York and Los Angeles on October 23rd, expanding to more cities in the following weeks. While its BFI London Film Fest premiere is scheduled for October 7th, it’s worth noting that the gala has been advertised as Suffragette‘s “European Premiere,” leaving the door open for an appearance at a North American-set fall film festival.

Watch the first trailer here

Check out the Suffragette UK trailer below:

Nicolas Winding Refn, who delighted many film-goers with Drive and alienated them with Only God Forgives (our review), has announced his next project, and it is a doozy. The Danish auteur will next make I Walk with the Dead, his first straight-on attempt at horror. The project has long been in development, though Refn finally broke the silence this morning from his twitter account.

Even you are tired of the whole zombie phase we are living through, you have to admit that I Walk with the Dead has a lot of potential. Refn’s stylish brand of filmmaking totally does not compute with the established zombie genre (his synth heavy, violent art films have been seen over and over again in vampire flicks), so there is a lot of room for originality.

More promising, however, is the news that I Walk with the Dead will feature an all-female cast, led by Drive co-star Carey Mulligan. Refn’s films have often been called out as misogynist, at the very least not friendly to his female characters, and so it is great to see a filmmaker responding to criticism by tackling the problems head on. Refn has always been a challenging filmmaker, but now he’s taking on a challenge himself.

The latest creation from masterminds Joel and Ethan Coen is about a folk musician named Llewyn Davis; a couch surfing cat-lover with a full beard who rarely is without his guitar, and is more concerned with being an artist than being a traditional careerist. Nowadays Davis would likely be considered a hipster, but the film is set back during in the early days of folk music. The most effective moments of Inside Llewyn Davis are when Davis is behind the mic with his guitar, unfortunately that happens less than you would expect. And while there is some great deadpan humor sporadically placed throughout, the overall tone of the film is a bit darker, focusing on his struggles to make it in life.

Inside Llewyn Davis opens with a two and a half minute solo of Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) strumming his guitar and belting out a downer folk song comprised of catchy hooks that you will not soon forget. At first it hard to tell if the hazy picture is due to the smoky interior of a small New York City pub circa 1961, but as soon as he steps outside the soft focus look remains observable. If you could not tell from the lyrics of his songs, Davis is a down on his luck musician who lives on other people’s couches without a penny to his name. Also, he may or may not have gotten a fellow folk singer (Carey Mulligan) pregnant.

When the subject of the story is someone who drifts from couch to couch with a career that is practically nonexistent, the film is going to have a natural aimless wander to it. This is fine at the beginning because Inside Llewyn Davis is frontloaded, containing its best scenes within the first hour of its runtime. Watching him trying to take care of a run-away cat is easily the highlight of the film; followed by a silly recording session with some of his friends (Justin Timberlake and Adam Driver) about being sent into outer space by President Kennedy. Unfortunately, the film spends too much time on autopilot after the midway point that it begins to grow tiresome and very unfocused.

The Coen brothers are known to create remarkably unique characters, just take a look at most of the characters in The Big Lebowski or Fargo. But all of the characters we are introduced to in Inside Llewyn Davis are abandoned before they can make a lasting impression. A prime example of this is when John Goodman leaves the picture as quickly as he appears—not even making it through an entire road trip. To top it off, the character we do spend the most time with, Llewyn Davis, happens to be the least interesting character of the film, despite it being easy to sympathize with his situation.

Inside Llewyn Davis is about as close as you get to be a musical without being one—a shame because the musical breaks are one of the strongest components of the film. Watching our protagonist wander through his journey becomes less interesting with each passing act of the film. There are some great moments in Inside Llewyn Davis, just not as many as you come to expect from a Coen brothers production.

Inside Llewyn Davis trailer

Steve McQueen’s Shame is a mesmerizing film about a man that has a severe addiction to sex who finds it impossible to have emotions around others. The film is dark and depressing with shame present in each of the characters eyes. But the true shame here is that the film will not be seen by most because of the NC-17 rating it received, a true shame.

The film starts off in a New York subway when Brandon Sullivan (Michael Fassbender) notices a woman on the train giving him flirty looks. A dramatic score builds up as she gets off the train at its next stop. We see a wedding ring on her finger but that does next stop him from chasing after her. He frantically looks all around the stop but she is nowhere in sight. In his mind, she was the one that “got away”.

At a glance Brandon seems to have everything going for him. He is a charming, handsome, and successful man. What you do not see the strong addiction he has to sex. He does not believe in marriage because he is incapable of emotionally connecting to people. The longest relationship he has ever had is four months and it was probably his longest by a landslide.

On any given night he brings a lady home from a bar, hires a prostitute or settles for internet pornography. He often watches pornography on his computer without pleasuring himself. It has gotten so bad that his work computer stopped working because of the amount of pornography and subsequently computer viruses that were on it.

He comes home one night to find music blaring in his apartment. Thinking he has walked in on some kind of criminal he quickly heads to the closest to get a bat. Then he bursts open the bathroom door only to find it is his sister, Sissy Sullivan (Carey Mulligan).

It would be just like Sissy to show up uninvited as that is the whimsical nature of her personality. She is a beautiful traveling singer but she is also not without her flaws. The first indication that she is suicidal is when she and Brandon are at the subway and she half-jokingly acts if she is going to step down to the tracks. Perhaps it was more of a reaction than a joke? The second time her suicidal tendencies comes up is at the dinner table when someone spots marks on her arms that she simply shrugs off by saying she was bored as a child.

Sissy just wants to stay in contact with her brother. She knows if she stops attempting to do so with him that she would never hear from him again. But he does not see it like that. Brandon looks at her as weight on his shoulders and a responsibility. She stands in his way of living the life he wishes to pursue.

Hinted along the way is the fact that their upbringing was rough, but it was never explained. It is not a bad thing that it was never explained as films often give out unnecessary details. Instead you will be thinking to yourself just exactly what it was that their parents did to thems growing up.

Michael Fassbender was simply stunning in his bravest and greatest performance to date. I agree with the many out there that say he was snubbed from an Oscar nomination, but it is not much of a mystery as to why. It had less to do with his performance in the film as it did with the rating of the film.

It is hard to believe that this marks only the second film that which Steve McQueen has directed. Shame was executed so well you think he would have been doing this his whole life. I have foolishly not seen his first film, Hunger, but after watching this one I will be sure to add it to my list.

The cinematography was very well done. In particular the scene where he is jogging down several blocks in downtown New York City. Shots of the city skyline are frequent throughout the film and a character in the film even says at one point, “Wow. I forget how beautiful this city is.” The colors in Shame are dark which works perfectly for its subject matter.

Ultimately, Shame is about the failure to connect emotionally with people. It is a passionate, perverse, and powerful film. But I suspect Steve McQueen knew this already. In the last scene of Shame the words powerful, thoughtful, and relevant appear clearly visible in the background. I do not think that was an accident.

An Education is a simple and sophisticated foreign indie film directed by Lone Scherfig. It was nominated for 3 Oscars including Best Picture and won Best Foreign Film at the Independent Spirit Awards. Not sure if I myself would nominate it as Best Picture, while it was a good overall film, it was not spectacular.

It is a coming-of-age story about a young girl named Jenny (Carey Mulligan) whose father is very determined that she goes to Oxford. Right from the very beginning she meets an older man named David (Peter Sarsgaard) who is witty, suave and wealthy. Naturally her father is a bit skeptical of this name but like her, he is caught off guard of his charm.

They go on a few date with some of his friends and seemed to hit things off quickly as they share similar tastes in music and art. David is almost too good to be true, you just cannot help but assume that there must be a catch. He was a bit vague with his answer when Jenny asked what he did for a living, certainly not going into any details about it. Then one evening he shows up and is sharing drinks with her parents trying to persuade them to let he take her to Oxford for the weekend. David tells them he is an alumni from there, only he told her he never went to college.

After the successfully convincing Jenny’s parents to allow her to go to Oxford, it is brought to David’s attention that Jenny is a virgin and intends to be so until she turns seventeen. David seems content with that. The next morning David and his friend/business partner are go into a house for business reasons. Jenny wants to join but is promptly denied thus further making what he does more suspicious.

Eventually David asks Jenny to marry him. She does not respond right away and has to think about it. She brings this up to her parents, asking them their thoughts on getting married instead of going to Oxford, presuming her father would say absolutely not. Instead, he is perfectly fine with it due to his fondness of David.

It is Jenny’s current school teacher who tells her that getting married would ruin her life and that not going to college would be tragedy. Advising her without a degree you will not be able to get a job. Jenny’s argument is that the education is hard and boring and once you get a job it will be hard and boring. She goes on to say that if she gets married she will live a wonderfully fun life by going to nice restaurants and listening to good music with the man of her dreams. A decision must be made.

First hour of An Education goes by so fast and it really does a good job of developing characters, something that I very much appreciate. Both Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard put on a showcase of great acting. If Carey Mulligan continues with performances as she did with this one, she will be a future star for sure. As the film progressed you slowly find out more and more about David and some of the mysteries that surround him. I felt that some of the initial charm of his was slowly fading and but you cannot discredit his good intentions completely.

What it excelled in character development it lacked in plot substance. I felt there could have been more done with it. The climax was faint and unsubstantial. An Education was not completely forgettable and I would recommend it as a watch once indie film.