By Linda Winsh-Bolard
Beautifully shot, period costumed; this take on 1960 London is very different than what we are used to.
Pivotal moments center the film, they are the sort of realizations that in real life feels like a fist hitting your stomach. The first one comes when Jenny says to her Father: Because that is all it is, isn’t it? Oxford is just an expensive dinner party.
Yes, girls, then and often now, going to college is just like attending dinner parties in Jane Austen novels: the purpose is to find you a suitably rich husband.
Not a long time ago, one of the US high ranking social services officials said on TV that the best insurance for women was marriage (I guess she did not know about the divorce rate).
When Jenny talks to her school director, she says: So, these are my choices? Hard and boring (work in an office)? Because that’s all there is, at least for women.
I am hard pressed for better description of a life of many women in the US. Of course, Jenny, like at least some women in the US, has a choice: she can marry a scoundrel for money.
Many do, it seems like a better option than suffering endless slights, discrimination and nastiness at work and it often pays better.
It’s not enough to educate us anymore, you have to tell us what for, Jenny continues.
Indeed, what for? To consider, like Jenny does, the drudgery of teaching in high school or the work of civil service clerk? Progress is inevitable, now women can serve men nearly everywhere, and if they are good enough in bed, perhaps one’d recommended some of them for better jobs (IMF leads the way by example).
If, on the other hand, we don’t play the game, the establishment will come down hard on us as it did on Hilary Clinton when it became clear that she is a great deal smarter and tougher than Barak Obama.
It took me many years to realize that regardless the propaganda I was fed in school, if I wanted to have a career than I need to find a man to give it me.
Kathryn Bigelow, whose film The Hurt Locker I greatly admire, had one-Cameron, Nicole Kidman had one- Cruise, and Hilary had Bill. Hell, our admired female news persons slept their way up and wrote about it in their memoirs.
We are still send to college to get married and we still cannot get anywhere without a penis behind us.
Thank you, BBC for making it so clear on a big screen.
At the end of the film Jenny grows up. Part of her growing up is learning how to keep secrets and how to play the game. Looking back at Oxford Jenny remembers: I was probably looking just as wide eyed as all the other students, but I was not. One of the boys I went out with, and they were all boys, once asked me to go to Paris with him and I said I’d love to. I was dying to see Paris as if I had never been. Do we all conform at the end?
The film shows how unbelievably cruel can women be to one another. The school’s director (nearly copying Sarah Palin) says to Jenny: I ‘m afraid the place in this school would be wasted on you (Jenny is different).But her teacher is incredibly generous saying : I was hoping you’d say that, after Jenny asks for private lessons to pass the entrance exam to Oxford having realized who she is.
I’d be better for all of us if we were generous to one another. But envy and fear of those who differ is even stronger among women than men. The different ones are regarded as threat in the hunt for the only game available-men. And men hate those who refuse to hunt them. It demeans men, drags them to the same level as the irrelevant woman who is so abhorrent that she believes herself to be an equal to a man.
It is an amazingly nuanced film about ambition, longing, growing up and responsibility. Jenny progresses from impressionable school girl wanting fun and excitement to a person understanding her own responsibility to herself, to her obligation to grow up and become the best person she can. Carey Mulligan embodies Jenny who does all that gently, humanly and touchingly. Mulligan’s Oscar nomination is well deserved. Alfred Molina is the charmer-rogue who does not even begin to understand the damage he causes. Certainly no hunk, Molina is such a good actor that his charming of a school girl is utterly natural.
All the cast is good, from those showing the limitations of dull family life to the choices of one odd teacher, they are all wonderful.
Lone Scherfig is one the few female directors who can, and here she does it beautifully, present a woman', indeed a child's, story while avoiding the label and pitfalls of chick film. This is grown up film for grown up people. Well done, please make more. We need them.
