Evanston: educations
Evanston: educations
I came of age so long ago that I have little interest in ‘coming of age’ movies; but yesterday we watched two: the British, AN EDUCATION, and the Chinese, UP THE YANGTZE; both of which received such critical acclaim that I took the chance.
AN EDUCATION’s Jenny is a sixteen year old student in suburban London when one afternoon she is caught with her cello in pouring rain on her way home from orchestra practice and offered a ride by David, a man at least ten years older than she. This being 1961, she accepts.
David charms her and her parents. He opens an adult world to her of concerts, art auctions, restaurants, jazz clubs, Oxford and Paris. She tells him that she wants to remain a virgin until her seventeenth birthday. After they do first make love, she wonders, almost regretfully, what all the fuss is about.
Along the way, she learns that at least some of David’s ample money is gained illegally; and then she discovers that he is married, has a child as well as a wife, and that she is not the first girl he has seduced.
All this is filmed, directed and acted with great skill. The movie received many nominations for best of 2010. And Carey Mulligan, the actress who plays Jenny and has been compared with the young Audrey Hepburn, was nominated for best actress.
On the other side of the world and forty years later, another girl of similar age also aspires to higher education, but Yu Shui, in the documentary, UP THE YANGTZE, comes from a poor family displaced by the Three Gorges Dam and is compelled to take a job on a river cruise ship which caters to middle class American and European tourists, who are thought rich by the Chinese crew. Among the instructions given to the crew are never to use the words ‘old’ ‘pale’ and ‘fat.’
Both these movies are exceptionally well done. Viewing them in juxtaposition was illuminating. I recommend watching AN EDUCATION first.
AN EDUCATION, being fiction, has a happy ending; UP THE YANGTZE, being true, does not.
I had occasion to pause UP THE YANGTZE by chance at the above image, which is a photograph of the television screen.
At times I have seen the markers at nearby Calvary Cemetery as chess pieces, here when I retuned to the room, the workers seemed to be notes in a bar of music
Sunday, January 30, 2011