*Editorial note: this piece contains references to predatory abuse*
Every once in a while, Lone Sherfig’s An Education (2009) pops up on iPlayer and my mum rips my arm off trying to get me to watch it. Last winter, I finally conceded. At the end, as the screen went black with the credits, my mum looked confused. That’s not the innocence I remember, she said.
The film, written by Nick Hornby, is based on Lynn Barber’s 2003 essay in Granta magazine (later expanded into a book) recounting her own experience as a schoolgirl being ‘courted’ by a much older man. In the piece, she expresses fear when he contacts her again as an adult, but her closing grievance was that he lied about who he was, rather than acknowledging that he took advantage of her. The recent commotion over Kate Elizabeth Russell’s auto-fiction novel My Dark Vanessa echoes this stance. Because Russell was complicit in her relationship with her teacher (even though she was a child at the time), she doesn’t call it abuse. But what exactly should we call it?
It can be extremely difficult to gain the necessary distance from intimate situations to know that what happened was abuse. This is made even harder when our culture tends to romanticize such positions. The intoxicating summer atmosphere of Guadagnino’s 2017 film Call Me by Your Name, which details the charming of what IMDb labels a ‘precocious’ seventeen year old by his father’s 24-year-old research assistant, persuades the audience to overlook the unequal relationship that the film portrays. Any criticism of this dynamic was largely drowned out by the wild popularity of the film.
Back in the murky depths of 2009, Vanity Fair released an article praising An Education under the title ‘Don’t Call An Education A Paedophile Film.’ Its author, Andi Teran claimed that because Barber was sixteen, the age of consent, the story is not that of a predator. The man, twenty years older, picks her up in his car when she’s still in her school uniform and gets her to play the role of a child-like character in his bedroom. I nearly threw the remote at the screen just hearing the bone-chilling names he wanted them to call each other.
An Education doesn’t stray far from the traditional in its formula. The forgettable face of the Colin Firth knock-off in Peter Sarsgaard guarantees that the film drifts into the same category as something like Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999). But in framing a story of child grooming as a charming romcom, some audience members were left squirming in their seats. In capturing so well what falling headfirst for the charms of a sociopath feels like, it left me feeling like it isn’t quite condemning what happens, going down like a sickly-sweet cup of coming-of-age tea.
The same year saw Andrea Arnold’s film Fish Tank (2009) come out, addressing the same themes as An Education with a more direct attack. The electric appeal of Irish actor Michael Fassbender helped Fish Tank to clear the floor of awards (An Education was largely only acknowledged for the breakout acting of Carey Mulligan). The film follows the isolated 15 year old Mia (Katie Jarvis) around her estate as she develops a growingly confusing relationship with her young mother’s new boyfriend. Shot beautifully from Mia’s perspective, it never feels patronising.
Fish Tank is engaging but can’t seem to help presenting the relationship between an adult and a young person as if they were Romeo and Juliet. Hell, even that goes as our culture’s most famous example of glorifying this dynamic. Neither film outright condemns the abuse but in failing to do so, they make it possible for the viewer to gain understanding. Where an underlying cultural current of questioning how survivors could get themselves into these situations remains, these films give an irrefutable voice to the perspective of the people caught in its net.
Both idealise their respective male figures, but where An Education goes for the light, Fish Tank runs headlong into the dark. Fish Tank’s grit (while I bury myself for using that out of touch word) makes it feel like a tonally more nuanced film. In its realism, the film is depressing but by not offering an easy resolution, it offers revelation. We see the good and the bad and are left confused, just like the main character. The credits roll out to Nas’ ‘Life’s A Bitch,’ putting forward a dynamic portrayal of finding scraps of good in even the hardest situations.
In depicting the heroine’s choice between love and learning (go to Oxford as planned, or drop out and get married), An Education glosses over the insidiousness of the man’s manipulation. Jenny (Mulligan) is only convinced to go back into the school system when that man lets her down. She scurries back to her teacher now finding that the woman’s bookishness has landed her an impressive house (not just what Jenny deems as a dull job). The rush to the film’s neat ending trips over itself, providing only flimsy advocacy for why learning can be so important.
But I do agree that An Education is an enjoyable film, comforting in all its knowingness. It is worth a watch, if for nothing more than a peek at a different era: the hedonism of 1960s London. Yet, the decade passing since the film’s production has seen a significant shift in views. As recent commentators have touched on, Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman’s clear-cut vindictive condemnation of abuse (ironically via a now grown-up Carey Mulligan) could only have been produced in the aftermath of 2017’s #MeToo movement. The film wasn’t released until 2020 because of Covid-based delays, meaning the tone of the film almost feels like that of a different era.
Meanwhile, the beast of my indignant stance in movie-watching disputes with my mum will continue to grumble.
An Education and Call Me by Your Name are available to stream on Amazon Prime Video. Fish Tank is available to stream on Netflix. Promising Young Woman is available to stream on Sky Cinema/NO
