 |
||||
|
Saturday March 27, 2010
16 year old Jenny, played with great wit and confidence by BAFTA winner and Oscar nominee Mulligan, is suffocating in the depths of middle class early 60’s suburbia. She is enslaved to her father’s carefully orchestrated vision of a secure and respectable future: educational diligence, homework, attendance at orchestra, polite afternoon teas, and the promise of an Oxbridge education. But the education she gets is not quite what father had in mind: considering herself more sexually sophisticated than her peers, and bored with geeky teenage paramours, Jenny wastes no time succumbing to the charms of an inappropriate, older man. Creepy David is 30 odd, engaged in indeterminate but slightly shady professional activity. However he has the gift of the gab, a flash car, an open wallet, and promises the glamour and adventure that Jenny craves. And in a bizarre parental volte face, David manages to expertly seduce Jenny’s erstwhile play-it-safe conservative parents, such that they enthusiastically condone Jenny’s growing involvement with him. It seems that the promise of financial solvency is, after all, their ultimate ambition for their beloved daughter. What could have been a style-heavy homage to youth and 60’s London is rescued from retro-sentimentality by Hornby’s screenplay – just gritty enough to be slightly unsettling, packing a real emotional punch, with astute observations on class, prejudice, and loss of innocence, and with plenty of sharp, laugh out loud dialogue. And the performances are spot on. Mulligan is fresh and breezy, arrogant and eager for adulthood, but with flashes of child-like vulnerability. Molina is priceless as Jenny’s Dad, fastidiously counting each penny invested in their middle class aspiration; Pike makes a funny and fabulous dumb blonde, and Thompson delivers a delicious cameo as the droll, anti-Semitic headmistress who has seen it all before. A delight from start to finish.
|
|||
