I went with Roscoe and Sheila to see An Education tonight, which is playing at a small theater by the Angel tube station near my flat. Kyle had seen ads for it and said he thought I would like it. He knows me so well: it’s set in the 1960s, about a girl torn between a life of jazz clubs, music, Paris, and fancy dinners, and going to Oxford to study literature. Just up my alley. The lead actress was wonderful—the London papers have been buzzing about her since the film festival, and I bet she will win awards for her role.
The best part, however, was a Q&A session directly after the film with the producer and Nick Hornby, the writer who adapted the short memoir into a screenplay. I don’t really know his work, but he wrote Fever Pitch and High Fidelity, both of which were made into movies. I always love hearing writers talk about their work, and it was particularly interesting to hear someone talk about this unique project: the original was written by Lynn as a ten-page memoir published in Granta (a magazine/journal known for new fiction), and then Nick Hornby, did the adaptation for film. He talked in depth about how he was excited, when writing the script, to see it made into a film. He said, “a film script is not a complete thing,” and he wanted a visual sense where he was lacking one—he wanted the words he was writing to be spoken. Interesting position on writing, a very present sense that your words are not the final thing, that it is supposed to be incomplete. The audience also asked him questions about Jenny’s (the main character) story, and he said that he found her to be very much situated in the time period—that the 1960s make her options more stark, and also how this period was the last time that the English consciousness had the same sort of love affair with all things French.
The Q&A was wonderful, but now, a few days later, I can’t get the movie out of my mind. The costumes and the sets are luminous, and the story is heartbreaking. Go see it.
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