One of the hottest films at Sundance this year is An Education, written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy, Fever Pitch) and directed by Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself). And Bilge Ebiri notes an interesting detail about the film at the end of this paragraph, in his review:
Set in the early 60s, the film is the story of 16-year old Jenny (Mulligan), a precocious and beautiful schoolgirl from a lower middle-class milieu who studies hard, plays the cello, and rifles through a dog eared copy of L’Etranger while dreaming of going to France, as Juliette Greco sings in the background. Jenny isn’t exactly a goody two-shoes, however. Most likely Oxford-bound, she has the smarts and the passion to know that she’s cut out for better things. One day, when David (Peter Sarsgaard), a handsome, older man with a taste for all the fine things she only dreams about, drives by and shows an interest in her, Jenny falls fast. David is a charmer, to be sure. He’s got money, he’s got friends who hang out at auctions and buy Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and he also has plenty of pointed lies to deploy: He convinces Jenny’s conservative parents to let him take her for a weekend jaunt to Oxford by promising he’ll introduce her to C.S. Lewis (or, as he calls him, “Clive”).
Well, for parents concerned about the sort of men their daughters are hooking up with — especially those who would be impressed by a man’s alleged friendship with Lewis — that last detail should be a dead giveaway that David is up to no good. Real friends of Lewis’s, of course, addressed him as “Jack“.
Not that that was necessarily well known at the time, of course.
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