An Education (film)

A riveting, edge of seat coming-of-age drama about a schoolgirl under the sway of an older man.

There's a sense of moral ambiguity about everything. It's not at all clear who's going to get hurt, and the tension is amazing.
Like any English film, the whole thing is riven through with class issues played for laughs, and may or may not be comprehensible to outsiders.

I would have found the whole scenario, and particularly the mistake leading to the denouement, completely unbelievable if I hadn't had a friend who could well have been the leading man. Truth really is stranger than fiction. That's not just something that people say. Having seen that sort of thing happen in real life, I can forgive the script-writer his unbelievable plot twist.

But actually the thing I'll remember for the rest of my life about this film is the sense it gives of the impossible glamour of Juliette Gréco. I'd only thought of her before as a woman with a strange voice on some old French songs. But from drab fifties London she must have been going off like a lighthouse.